Psychology and Its Cities

The crowd that gathered to see President McKinley—to personally greet him, if they could—was large but not unruly that September afternoon in 1901. The site was the Temple of Music, the main auditorium at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. The day before, McKinley had given a speech to a crowd of 50,000 at The Esplanade, a large outdoor area on the fairgrounds. The man had, during his first term in office, presided over the return of American prosperity after the crash of 1893, preached an end to isolationism, and called for increased foreign trade.

Today, however there were to be no more speeches. McKinley arrived at the Temple of Music, which had been cleared of chairs to accommodate the large body of onlookers that was expected to be on hand. Along one wall of the vast room, a wide pathway was created, leading up to the President, where visitors could momentarily shake his hand. Despite the great expectant throng that arrived, the reception was scheduled to last only ten minutes. The president’s secretary had tried to cancel the event, but McKinley insisted on keeping it. Mingling with the public was one of his favorite aspects of politicking.

Seven minutes after the event began, a man stepped up to McKinley whose right hand was wrapped in cloth. Perhaps thinking the hand was injured, McKinley reached for the man’s left hand instead. As he did, two shots rang out from the pistol concealed in the man’s right hand. McKinley was hit and fell backwards into the arms of the attendants around him. The shooter was tackled by nearby security men and others. The wounded president was taken to a small hospital on the Exposition grounds. A doctor was soon summoned, but he was not a surgeon and could offer only the most basic treatment. When a surgeon finally arrived, he was unable to locate the bullet that had pierced McKinley’s abdomen and decided to stich the wounds without removing it. For the next few days, McKinley appeared to recover, but on the seventh day after the attack, gangrene began to take hold. McKinley died the next day, September 14, 1901—almost precisely 20 years after the last presidential assassination, that of James Garfield.¹

The assassin turned out to be an unemployed factory worker named Leon Czolgosz. He was a Polish Catholic immigrant’s son from the midwest and had lost his job during the Panic of 1893. In his despair, he had turned to anarchist politics, becoming obsessed with Emma Goldman after seeing her speak.² In short, he was the very specter of what Americans feared most when they imagined hordes of untutored, undemocratic, desperate alien newcomers and the chaos they might unleash on America if not kept strictly in check. Czolgosz’s trial began just nine days after the President’s death. The defense called no witnesses, and Czolgosz was convicted and condemned to death within days. Just a month afterwards, on October 29, 1901, he was executed by electric chair.

McKinley was immediately succeeded by his youthful, new vice president, Theodore Roosevelt. It was a transition that probably changed the course of US history as decisively as any event since the Civil War. Although McKinley and Roosevelt were both Republicans, the two men saw eye-to-eye on very little. Indeed, Roosevelt had been chosen for the vice presidency by the Republican Party brass, first, to use his personal popularity to help get McKinley re-elected and, second, to bury him in a powerless job where his Progressive views were unlikely to see the light of day. To fully understand the significance of Roosevelt’s rise to power, one must go back to the most significant event of McKinley’s first term—the Spanish–American War.

In February of 1898, a US Navy ship, the Maine, had exploded and sunk in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, killing 266 American sailors. The disaster occurred just weeks before Cuba was to start a new period of autonomy from its historical colonial master, Spain, after decades of violent revolts. Rumors were rife that the American ship had been sunk by Spanish loyalists in retaliation against alleged US support for the Cuban independentistas.

Political pressure quickly built on McKinley, who had been president for less than a year, to respond to the putative provocation with military force. The actual cause of the explosion was far from clear, however—it may have come from within the ship itself—and McKinley was eager to the resolve matter diplomatically in order to preserve American commercial interests on the massive Caribbean island. Indeed, the Maine had been docked at Havana for the very purpose of protecting US assets in the wake of riots that had rocked the Cuban capital in the weeks leading up to autonomy. War with Spain would not only put those assets at risk, but might undermine the whole process leading to Cuban self-rule. With the deaths of hundreds of American sailors to avenge, though, it became increasingly difficult for McKinley to resist the demands of the “war party” without seeming irresolute.

In late April, more than two months after the sinking, McKinley finally yielded to the politics of the situation and ordered the US Navy to blockade Cuba. Days later, predictably, Spain declared war on the US. Cuba, however, was not the only problem in Spain’s aging and rickety empire. The US immediately took advantage of its adversary’s widespread troubles: In the Philippines, a revolution that had broken out two years earlier had settled into an uneasy ceasefire. In an effort to stretch Spanish military resources to the breaking point, McKinley ordered a fleet of seven gunships to sail for Manila.³ When they arrived on May 1, they quickly destroyed the 12 Spanish ships protecting the capital and blockaded Manila Bay. Later that same month, the US attacked Puerto Rico and, in June, took control of Guam as well. Over the summer of 1898, the two countries fought in multiple theaters but, by August, Spain was exhausted and sued for peace. The US annexed the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, but granted Cuba its independence.

Over the short course of the Spanish–American war, a new and valiant personage had emerged on to the American scene: Theodore Roosevelt. He had been McKinley’s assistant secretary of the Navy but at the outbreak of war he abruptly resigned his office to form a volunteer cavalry regiment. Roosevelt came from a wealthy New York family that traced its lineage all the way back to Dutch rule. Back in the 1880s, when he had been in his 20s, he had served three terms in the New York State legislature. However, shattered by the sudden death of his young wife in 1884, he had quit politics and moved to Dakota Territory where he had become a rancher. He first came to national prominence during that time, through a multivolume book he wrote about the American conquest of the West.⁴

When he finally returned east, Roosevelt was appointed to the US Civil Service Commission by then-president Benjamin Harrison. He later became commissioner of the New York City police, where he rooted out corruption and helped Jacob Riis clean up the notorious Five Points district (as we saw earlier). When McKinley was elected president in 1896, Roosevelt lobbied him intensively for a post in the Naval Department. He got the posiiton he wanted but, when the opportunity arose to personally fight in a war—especially one to evict an old power from the New World—it was more than he could resist. He quit his government job and assembled his regiment: “The Rough Riders.”

Through a series of well-publicized exploits in the Cuban theater—especially at San Juan Hill—Roosevelt rose from a mere author and politician to a national war hero. He returned home and was able to exploit his new renown to win the Republican gubernatorial nomination in New York. He beat his Democratic opponent in the general election,⁵ but he made “machine” Republicans nervous and unhappy with his advocacy of Progressive policies that were seen as unfriendly to big business, the traditional ally of the Republican Party. His personal popularity, though, enabled him to accomplish things no other governor could have. During his single term in office, he regulated business to ensure more fairness and honesty, he imposed a business tax, and he pushed through legislation limiting the length of the workday for women and children.

Progressives across the country were drawn to him, but New York’s Republican leadership was aghast. Scrambling for a way to dissuade Roosevelt from running for re-election (which he surely would have won), the top officials of his own party turned to President McKinley during the run up to his 1900 re-election campaign, pleading with him to nominate Roosevelt for the vice presidency.⁶ McKinley was no fan of Roosevelt’s Progressivism, but he thought that the dashing and vigorous New Yorker might appeal to voters as the president competed for a second time against the more youthful and charismatic Democrat, William Jennings Bryan. After the election was won, it was thought, Roosevelt would be safely neutralized by the impotency of his new office, and his “radical” views would have no impact on government policy.

Roosevelt privately resisted the nomination. At just 41 years of age, he had presidential aspirations of his own, and no vice president had subsequently been elected to the presidency since the 1830s. McKinley’s wishes prevailed, of course, and Roosevelt reluctantly accepted the call. In March of 1901, he was sworn in as vice president.⁷ But just over six months later, McKinley was dead and the popular champion of Progressivism, Theodore Roosevelt, was unexpectedly thrust into the presidency of the United States. He was the youngest chief executive in the nation’s history and the future of the republic suddenly afforded possibilities that had seemed hardly imaginable a week prior.

Still, although the head of government had changed, the raucous labor situation that Roosevelt faced was more or less the same one the country had been grappling with for decades, except that the conflicts were now more intense and fraught with even greater danger. Unions had technically been legal in the US since 1842, but a variety of legal restrictions had prevented them from being terribly effective. Increasing frustrations on the parts of both labor and capital brought about violent confrontations between them on a regular basis. A large union called The Knights of Labor had been the most prominent defenders of the working class, boasting as many as 800,000 members in the mid-1880s. After the Haymarket explosion in 1886, however, the Knights were beleaguered by accusations of being in cahoots with violent anarchists. Many workers left the organization, turning instead to the newer and more moderate American Federation of Labor. The AFL was not a union, per se, but an association of independent unions that were each dedicated to a specific “craft”: railway workers, miners, textile works, etc.

The first crisis of Roosevelt’s administration, in May of 1902, was a strike by more than 100,000 coal miners in Pennsylvania. Not atypically, the miners demanded a 20% wage increase, a reduction in the workday from ten hours to eight, and recognition by mine owners of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) as their collective bargaining agent. Owners, for their part, refused to negotiate with the union at all, seeing the setting of wages and hours as their own God-given prerogative.⁸ The strike dragged on through the summer. It was not totally peaceful but neither did it break into the open warfare that some earlier coal strikes in the West had. By October, Roosevelt could foresee that a winter without Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal, which was used to heat tens of millions of urban homes, would quickly lead to a national crisis. So, working through the pre-eminent financier, J. P. Morgan, Roosevelt created a commission to study the situation and make recommendations. The strike was suspended during the commission’s three months of fact finding and hearings, thereby enabling Roosevelt and the country to dodge a winter disaster. In the end, the commission recommended a resolution that could have been proposed at the outset, splitting the difference between the two sides: a 10% pay hike and a nine-hour workday. The workers dropped their demand for union recognition and agreed to the compromise. Mine owners resisted, but finally capitulated when Roosevelt privately threatened to nationalize the entire American coal industry. There would not be another major coal strike in the US for a generation.

Roosevelt was a “hero” once again. The “Square Deal” that he promised the American public did not end there. He went on to break up large corporate monopolies, he capped often-erratic rail rates, and he coaxed Congress to pass laws that ensured the purity of commercially processed of food and drugs.⁹ Government intervention aimed at moderating the excesses of unbridled capitalism without capitulating to the revolutionary demands of communists and anarchists had, in a few short years, become the new American reality.

2. William James and the Psychology of Religion

In 1901, William James was entering his sixtieth year. Nearing the peak of his philosophical powers, he was invited to give a series of twenty lectures on the topic of “natural theology” at the University of Edinburgh. The annual event was supported by the estate of a wealthy lawyer, Adam Lord Gifford, whose 1887 will had provided for lecture programs at each of Scotland’s four universities—St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. James’ junior Harvard colleague, Josiah Royce, had given the Aberdeen Gifford Lectures back in 1899, where he had presented the lectures that would be published as The World and the Individual.¹⁰ The subject of James’ lectures was nearly as expansive: The Varieties of Religious Experience. The published version of these lectures became, perhaps, James’ most popular book, read to this day by students of religion, philosophy, and psychology. It ranged far and wide, discussing such diverse topics as neurology, religious conversion, saintliness, and mysticism. James also introduced an influential distinction between two religious motivations—the “healthy mind” and the “sick soul.” In the midst of his discussion of the latter, he revealed the details of his own mental crisis, more than thirty years before, but disguised them as coming from a letter sent to him by an anonymous French correspondent.¹¹

Toward the end of the lecture series, however, James framed his assessment of theology, as traditionally practiced, in terms of a philosophical position that was probably unfamiliar to his listeners. Invoking the name of his longtime friend, Charles Sanders Peirce, whom he described as “an American philosopher of eminent originality,” James introduced what he called the “principle of pragmatism.”¹²The only motivation for thought, he began, is to arrive at a settled belief. Only once belief is set, he continued, can action “firmly and safely begin.” Thus, he concluded, “the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits.”¹³ This is not exactly how Peirce had put the matter in the article published 24 years before which James cited as his source, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.”¹⁴ It was close enough, however, for his intended purposes.

James went on to use this form of pragmatism to argue that philosophical theology, as it was then practiced, was religiously sterile and could never be sufficient, with its logical gymnastics, to bring nonbelievers to faith. As James bluntly put it, “to prove God’s goodness by the scholastic argument that there is no non-being in his essence would sound to such a witness [a skeptic] simply silly.”¹⁵ Only personal experience of the divine, James said, can compel faith. Theology only follows along in a secondary role, organizing and elaborating on faith that was initially attained through entirely other means. Then, after quoting a long passage from the great religious philosopher John Caird, James commented,

Because no philosophy of religion could ever live up to the task of creating compelling foundations for religious belief, according to James, he called for its replacement by a “Science of Religions”—a discipline that could take the various definitions of the divine that it finds in the world and, “by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from these definitions… . Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she [science] can leave a residuum of conceptions that at least are possible.” Gathering steam, he even went on to suggest that he did not see why,

The connections to James’ long effort—empirical and otherwise—to bring scientific credibility to spiritualism here are obvious. While it may be easy to smile at his enthusiastic optimism about the potential of a Science of Religions to “command general public adhesion,” it is important to note that he was speaking to a critical and growing divide in Euro-American religious life. Challenges continued to press in from every side against the simple Calvinist faith that had long served as America’s moral bedrock. From “above,” there was the importation of the German “Higher Criticism,” which called into question the historical accuracy of the familiar Biblical account of Christianity’s origins and meaning. From the “sides,” every day brought new scientific revolutions that clashed with common sense ideas about nature. Darwin’s Natural Selection had only been the start. Mendel’s genetic principles, first published in the 1860s, were rediscovered and popularized around 1900. Max Planck’s Quantum Hypothesis also appeared in 1900; Einstein’s Special Relativity would come in 1905. In addition, there was a flood of challenging and seductive new technologies: personal cameras, cylinder phonographs, moving pictures, telephones, electric light, affordable automobiles, and even powered flight.

As if philosophical questioning from above and scientific disruption on all sides weren’t challenging enough, from “below” came the press of new (to America) religious denominations—Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, and even Buddhism were brought to the nation’s shores by wave after wave of desperate immigrants. From within the US itself, new and unorthodox religious beliefs were on the rise. In some cases whole new denominations were coming into existence and attracting huge followings. The Mormons of New York State—not even regarded as Christians by many—had migrated to Utah in the 1840s, where they had been granted statehood in 1896. From New England, Mary Baker Eddy had captured the country’s attention with her doctrine that disease is illusory and can be cured by the power of prayer alone.¹⁸ Her Church of Christ, Scientist, chartered in 1879, built a monumental edifice in the middle of Boston in the 1890s. Christian Science was the fastest growing religion in the US in the early years of the 20th century.¹⁹ There was also the Watchtower Society (later renamed Jehovah’s Witnesses), the Seventh Day Adventists, and many other sects not as well known, each declaring new and absolute “Truths” that deviated from those of conventional Christianity.

Older Christian denominations were changing too, growing increasingly liberal in their stances toward sin and salvation—especially the Universalists and the Unitarians who now dominated Harvard. It was a perplexing, confounding time for conventional Protestants and it would not be long before religious traditionalists began to fight back. Starting in 1910, a Baptist pastor named Amzi Clarence Dixon and a Congregationalist minister named Reuben Archer Torrey began issuing a 12-volume book series titled The Fundamentals.²⁰ The 90 essays therein, written by 64 different authors, were aimed at defining exactly the boundaries of conventional Protestant piety and, in doing so, creating the basis of modern Christian Fundamentalism in America. The Fundamentals, however, was not the product of a “grassroots” movement generated by disgruntled, ordinary religious traditionalists. It was top-down project from the start, anonymously funded by a California oil tycoon named Lyman Stewart. He invested $300,000 in the project, so that the full sets of The Fundamentals could be given away to ministers, missionaries, and other Christian workers, enabling them to fight the “modernism” that he feared was undermining traditional American faith.

3. A Science of Pastoral Care? Psychotherapy Is Born

In Boston, one church in particular was exactly the kind that most alarmed conventional old-line Christians like Lyman Stewart. Perhaps surprisingly, its denomination was neither new nor radical. It was, in fact, Episcopal—the highest rung on the social ladder of American Protestant denominations. It was called the Emmanuel Church and, since 1860, it had stood on Newbury Street, in the fashionable Back Bay neighborhood that William James had seen come into existence over the course of his 40 years in the Boston area.

In the early 20th century, the Emmanuel Church was led by a priest, Elwood Worcester, whose academic qualifications included a doctorate from Leipzig, where none other than Wilhelm Wundt had served as the secondary professor (Zweitgutachter) on his thesis. Worcester had been born in Ohio in 1862, but he was raised in Rochester, New York where he had become close with a noted Episcopal priest and Social Gospel advocate Algernon Crapsey.²¹ During the 1880s, as a college student, Worcester earned a BA at Columbia and a divinity degree at the General Theological Seminary (for Episcopalians), also in New York. Then, like so many others, he went to Germany to learn the new psychology. Although Worcester wrote that, “it was [Wundt] who had brought me to Leipzig,” he also recollected with particular fondness the time he spent in Gustav Fechner’s final lecture course.²² “His soul entered so deeply into my soul,” Worcester recalled, “his thought has so accompanied me through life, that I can no longer distinguish the transcendent quality of his mind from the man of flesh and blood—what I have read from what I have heard.”²³ It was not Fechner’s pioneering work on psychophysics that most affected Worcester but the “haunting, unforgettable beauty” of his lesser-known and eccentric spiritual writings: Zend Avesta; Nana, the Soul-Life of Plants (Nanna oder über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen); The Question as to Souls (Über die Seelenfrage); and The Three Motives and Grounds of Faith (Die drei Motive und Gründe des Glaubens).²⁴ Although it is sometimes reported that Worcester took his doctorate in experimental psychology under Wundt, his thesis, completed in 1889, was actually on the religious opinions of John Locke, supervised by the historian and philosopher Max Heinze.²⁵ After graduating, Worcester took an academic appointment at Lehigh University and, after a few years, added parish work in Philadelphia (where he became friends with the noted neurologist and neurasthenia researcher, Silas Weir Mitchell).

In 1904, Worcester was appointed rector at the Emmanuel Church. In Boston, he found a community of like-minded intellectuals who were experimenting with a variety of unorthodox means of alleviating various kinds of mental distress that, although sometimes deeply troubling to the individual, did not often rise to a level of severity that required confinement in the local asylum.²⁶ This community included a number people we have already encountered—William James,²⁷ Stanley Hall, Josiah Royce, Adolf Meyer. In addition, there was Harvard’s professor of nervous diseases, James Jackson Putnam. There were also a Tufts College neurologist named Morton Prince and a brilliant physician and psychopathologist who had emigrated from Ukraine named Boris Sidis.²⁸

In 1905, Worcester persuaded an Irish Presbyterian minister who especially impressed him, Samuel McComb, to convert to Episcopalianism and become his new Associate Rector. Worcester also set out to earn the trust of three prominent local physicians: two Massachusetts General Hospital doctors named Richard C. Cabot and Joseph Pratt, as well as a Tufts College neurologist named Isador Coriat (a one-time student of Adolf Meyer).²⁹ Worcester assisted them in the treatment of local tuberculosis patients—primarily by helping them to better comply with medical recommendations about physical activity, nutrition, and fresh air. He also taught a class for these patients on “morale and obedience.”

Worcester then brought this elite group together for a new project: to address the “spiritual maladies of mankind” by “forming a class … for the moral and psychological treatment of nervous and psychic disorders.”³⁰ In the fall of 1906, over the course of four successive Sunday evenings, Putnam, Cabot, McComb, and Worcester presented lectures to interested members of the Emmanuel congregation on mind and brain, on the effects of alcohol and drugs on consciousness and the body, and on “Jesus’ healing ministry.” When the series concluded, they announced they would be opening a “clinic” to assist any parishioners who were troubled by mental distress. The response was as immediate as it was astonishing. The very next morning, Worcester found 198 people lined up for help. Thereafter, his clinic, held twice per week, drew hundreds more.³¹

The Emmanuel’s therapeutic sessions included hymns and prayers, as one might expect at a church event, but they also featured examinations and consultations with the physicians. They seem to have also used a variety of hypnotic techniques that, despite their strenuous claims to be entirely distinct from the past “mind cure” movement, were drawn from sources such as Phineas Quimby’s early-19th-century “New Thought” teachings.³² There were also private consultations with ministers (called “moral clinics”), sessions of what we would now call “group therapy,” and even private house calls.

The response to the success of Worcester’s clinic was nothing short of a nationwide sensation. Newspaper and magazine articles about the psychological practices being pioneered at the Emmanuel Church multiplied rapidly, many of them more sensational than informative. Ministers came from other churches in Boston to learn the techniques (and to win some popular attention) for themselves. Worcester and McComb toured other cities to spread word of their experiences. Soon, New York and Chicago both had their own Emmanuel-like centers providing the same kinds of services to their own flocks.

One of the things that made the original Boston group different from other “mind cure” movements was that it was eager to establish and sustain the scientific credibility of its practices. For this reason, they chose the ugly neologism “psychotherapy” to describe their activities, in order set them apart.³³ As Cabot once put the matter:

To bolster their claims to scientific respectability, Cabot kept and published statistical tallies of their results: of 178 men examined, 82 were neurasthenic, 24 were “insane,” 22 were alcoholic, 18 had “fears or fixed ideas,” 10 had sexual neuroses, 5 were hysterics, and so forth. Of 123 outcomes, he reported, there were “seventy-five cases in which undoubted benefit has resulted … and nothing to offset it.”³⁵

The actions of a few men at the Emmanuel Church had unexpectedly exploded into a national “Emmanuel Movement,” many offshoots of which were well beyond the control of the careful little group that had started the uproar. Unable to keep up with the demand for their guidance in person, in 1908, Worcester, McComb, and Coriat combined efforts to author a book on the Emmanuel program.³⁶ Nevertheless, many unscrupulous imitators who had no connection with the Emmanuel Church, but who were eager to exploit the situation for their own gain, began to ply their own trades under the Emmanuel name. This caused the nascent institution of uncertain intellectual standing to quickly topple into disrepute.

Cabot’s careful quantitative reassurances notwithstanding, the response from the medical and broader scientific community was quick and, for the most part, negative. The judgment of many was that Emmanuel was nothing more than doctors and ministers of unusual naïveté who had been duped by Christian Scientists. Emmanuel’s connection to Boston, which was also the headquarters for Mary Baker Eddy’s church, did nothing to help matters. Boston was “the land of witchcraft and transcendentalism” sneered Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Clarence B. Farrar in his effort to tar Emmanuel with the same brush. The physicians involved, he thundered, are “sell[ing] their birthright and surrender[ing] a part of their legitimate province, … hand[ing] over impotently to the clergy for treatment … manifestations of disease or trauma.”³⁷

Many traditional clergy objected to the Emmanuel movement as well, fearing that their grand vision of the divine was being crudely reduced to a mere spa. Some demanded to know by what authority Worcester and McComb had taken these actions in the name of the church, as though matters of heresy might be at stake. The Emmanuel ministers typically responded to such accusations with Biblical allusions about Jesus healing the sick and comforting the afflicted.³⁸

Psychologists were split on the matter. Some, such as James Rowland Angell of Chicago (a one-time student of James), were favorable. Others, such as Lightner Witmer (who had founded a “psychological clinic” to assess and treat learning problems in school children at the University of Pennsylvania) condemned it as unsound and unscientific. ³⁹ Still others staked out an intermediate position. Hugo Münsterberg, whose own book Psychotherapy came out in 1909, was critical of Christian Science and its like for “cheapen[ing] religion by putting the accent in the meaning of life on personal comfort and absence of pain” but, contrary to many clergymen, he argued that “the originators of the Emmanuel Movement stand well above such error.” Nevertheless, he thought that many of the followers in “their national congregation” had taken a hedonistic misstep.⁴⁰ In the end, although he believed Emmanuel to represent a case of “actual cooperation of physician and minister” (unlike Christian Science, which he felt simply abused the latter term), he expected Worcester’s movement to serve only as a transitional stage for psychotherapy in its journey from the realm of religion to that of science.⁴¹

The physicians associated with Emmanuel soon withdrew from the group under pressure from their professional communities. Within just a few short years, the Emmanuel “flash” had mostly burnt itself out. Worcester and McComb scaled back their operation to a small clinic running solely out of their own church, increasingly focused on the problem of alcoholism, but they continued on for twenty years more, until Worcester retired in 1931.

4. The American Debut of Psychoanalysis

The year 1909 was Clark University’s 20th anniversary and Stanley Hall planned to have a memorable celebration at which some of the world’s most important scholars and scientists would present lectures and be awarded honorary degrees.⁴² The celebration was to be a multifaceted affair: Hall mounted conferences on a number of different subjects—mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology—but the conference on psychology was, of course, closest to his heart. He began planning in December of 1908, inviting Wundt and Freud each to give a series of lectures and to receive honorary degrees. Wundt was, of course, a towering figure in the field internationally, and Hall had been the first American to study under him at Leipzig. Freud, on the other hand, was less known, but Hall had read and appreciated his work since the start of the decade. It was a bold opening gambit to invite the two of them, but both men turned Hall down. Wundt pleaded old age; he would be 77 in 1909. Freud was young enough, just 53, but he averred that in July—the proposed time—it would be impossible for him to undertake such a voyage. Hall then invited Alfred Binet, whose new test of mental ability was starting to be used in the US, but the Sorbonne professor declined as well.

It was not a promising start. Hall was finally able to entice Hermann Ebbinghaus, the notable memory researcher, and Ernst Meumann, an innovative educational psychologist. Meumann had taken up the Zürich professorship that Münsterberg had refused back in the 1890s, but he had since moved on to Königsberg, Münster, and Halle. Hall’s bad luck continued, however, when Ebbinghaus died suddenly in February 1909, and then Meumann changed his mind about coming.

Undoubtedly frustrated with his lack of progress, Hall finally managed to engage William Stern (who would later develop the idea of the intelligence quotient or IQ) for the “experimental psychology” slot that had first been offered to Wundt and then to Ebbinghaus. Carl Jung was eventually landed for the “pedagogy” slot that had been refused by both Binet and Meumann. It was an odd fit, though: Jung’s best-known work at the time—a word-association test for psychopathology—had little to do with pedagogy. Interestingly, Jung may have been better known to American psychologists than Freud was because the younger man had studied and worked at the Berghölzi Clinic in Zürich, where Adolf Meyer had studied as well. They had even shared some of the same teachers.⁴³ In addition, Jung’s 1903 dissertation, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, had attracted the attention of William James, among others.

Hall then circled back to invite Freud once again, raising his honorarium and changing the time of the conference to September to suit Freud’s schedule. This time Freud agreed to attend. Hall also gathered some well-known professors working in America: Cornell experimentalist Edward Titchener, psychiatrist Adolf Meyer (who was just then moving from New York to Johns Hopkins), Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas (who had once been a professor at Clark), and Johns Hopkins biologist Herbert Spencer Jennings. Although it is often presumed that Freud had “first billing” at Hall’s conference, it was Jennings’ lectures that actually received the bulk of the press coverage.⁴⁴

Freud and Jung stayed with Hall at his home. William James visited the day before the conference was to begin, spending an evening with them. Although he is said to have been impressed with Freud’s theories, he was not captivated by the man himself. By contrast, his connection with Jung was nearly immediate. James had arrived brandishing a reprint of his latest report on the spiritualist, Leonora Piper, and he discussed it with Jung animatedly.⁴⁵ It is unclear what James knew, at that point, of the far less favorable conclusions that Hall’s assistant at Clark, Amy Tanner, was about to publish on Piper’s putative psychic abilities.⁴⁶

Freud gave his five lectures over the course of the second week of September 1909. First, he spoke about the famous case of Anna O., an “hysteric” who had been treated by Freud’s older colleague, Joseph Breuer. Freud related how the case had led him to the conclusion that hysterical symptoms are the products of traumatic events that the patient cannot consciously recall. When the memories were coaxed back into consciousness—under hypnosis, for instance—the symptoms would sometimes vanish.⁴⁷ In the second lecture, Freud elaborated a general theory of how traumatic memories could be “repressed” into unconsciousness, how the memories re-emerged symbolically in the form of neurotic symptoms, and how the patient’s “resistance” to recalling them consciously could be overcome by the analyst. In the third lecture, he argued that symbolic expressions of repressed memories might emerge in less obvious forms, such as slips of the tongue and dreams. Correspondingly, he advocated techniques such as free association and the analysis of dreams to help draw them back into consciousness. In the fourth lecture, he shifted to his stage-wise theory of infant sexuality and its importance for healthy psychological development. In the final lecture, Freud elaborated his belief that some of the greatest products of civilization are, in fact, the result of people struggling with their own repressions and frustrations, through an unconscious process that he dubbed “sublimation.”

The lectures were well received in the press although, because they had been in German, scholars such as Hall himself facilitated (or even wrote) a fair bit of the coverage. Titchener, of course, was opposed to nearly everything Freud stood for. The completion of pure experimental psychology was going to have to come before a truly valuable application of its principles would be possible. In any case, he scoffed that Freud’s exotic conclusions were based on little more than a primitive associationism. Titchener and Meyer entered into their fascinating and contentious correspondence on the topic in the weeks following the conference. Their debate illustrated as well as anything how far the “pure” and “applied” portions of the field had already diverged from each other during the discipline’s short history.⁴⁸ Hall seems to have provoked an active debate between Titchener and Freud at the conference. Titchener was never shy about extolling his brand of psychology above all others, but there was a little extra at stake for him at this event due to confidential discussions that he was having with Hall at the time about the possibility of taking over as Clark’s professor of psychology when Hall’s protégé, Edmund Sanford, was promoted into the principalship of the newly created undergraduate college at Clark.⁴⁹

Jung’s three lectures were interspersed among Freud’s five, as well as those of some other speakers. He presented the results of a test that purported to ferret out emotional “complexes” (psychopathologies) simply by asking people to say whatever first came to mind in response to a list of seemingly ordinary words, and measuring their reaction times. The longer it took to reply, Jung theorized, the more likely an unconscious complex lay there, interfering with the normal process of mental association. Jung’s talks left a marked impression on the American psychological scene. In the years immediately following the conference, many articles testing and debating Jung’s “association method” appeared in Hall’s American Journal of Psychology.⁵⁰

Both Jung’s and Freud’s lectures were translated and published in the American Journal in 1910. The Clark conference would be Freud’s only trip to the US. After the gathering, he toured some sights of the eastern US and spent a good deal of private time at the country house of James Jackson Putnam, in whom he found a significant convert to the psychoanalytic cause. After the visit, Freud returned home to Europe forever, but remained a regular correspondent of Putnam’s for years afterwards.⁵¹

For Jung, by contrast, the Clark conference would be only the first of many visits to America. He returned the following spring, visiting New York, Chicago, and Boston (where he met with James for a second time). He was, by then, held in such high repute by Americans that he was asked to consult on the cases of Fanny Bowditch (daughter of the Harvard physiologist Henry Bowditch, who had given James his original laboratory training) and of Stanley McCormick (son of the Chicago farm equipment magnate, Cyrus McCormick, who we met in Chapter 6). Jung made additional visits to the US in 1912 and 1913, holding seminars at prominent American universities and hospitals.⁵²

Putnam, still smarting from the Emmanuel fiasco, became an active advocate of psychoanalysis after Freud’s visit. He served as the first president of both the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1911 and the Boston Society for Psychoanalysis in 1914. It may have been that Freud afforded Putnam a “scientific” mode in which to talk about the aspects of the human psyche that most fascinated him—dreams, emotions, sex, instincts, neuroses, psychoses, and other “irrationalities”—without becoming entangled in the religious complexities of the Emmanuel movement.

According to the historian of psychology Eugene Taylor, however, the version of psychoanalysis that grew up in the US after Freud’s appearance at Clark was more “transcendental” in character than Freud’s original. In the minds of many Americans who adopted the label “psychoanalysis,” like Putnam, the unconscious was not merely a repository of repressed impulses and traumatic memories. It was, instead, the site of a “greater” mind, a “deeper” mind than the thin layer available to consciousness. It contained not just the tawdry secrets of one’s own life, but also profound secrets of life itself. Thus, the psychoanalytic unconscious of New England mingled the views of Viennese psychiatry with those of Concord philosophy; it was a blending of Freud and Emerson. Because of the tendency toward the metaphysical, even mystical, this American reading of psychoanalysis had a closer affinity with Jung’s construal of the subject, even as it went by Freud’s name.

This “transcendental” understanding of psychoanalysis remained common in America until the 1930s, when the major American psychoanalytic institutes were established in New York and Chicago. By that time, a significant number of Freud-trained European psychoanalysts had come to the US, fleeing the Nazi storm that was starting to engulf central Europe. It was under their orthodox influence that the New England flavoring began to fade, and a more authentic Freudian tone was restored to American psychoanalysis.⁵³

Even so, psychoanalysis remained a minority position in American psychiatry. Adolf Meyer was the dominant figure in the field. His and Clifford Beers’ National Committee for Mental Hygiene (mentioned in Chapter 7) took the lead. It would not be until World War II that (yet another flavor of) psychoanalysis rose to prominence in American psychiatry. That shift was driven primarily by the US military’s confidence in the abilities of William and Karl Menninger—enterprising brothers who ran a psychiatric clinic in Topeka, Kansas—to train the hundreds of professionals required to handle the psychiatric fallout from the vast European and Asian conflicts then underway.⁵⁴ It was for similar reasons that, at about this time, the US government urged the American Psychological Association, then still primarily a scientific organization, to merge with the American Association for Applied Psychology and, together, organize and assist universities in training clinical psychologists. This would produce hundreds more mental health professionals to conduct much-needed psychotherapy for veterans who had been mentally injured by their wartime experiences. It was this intervention by the government that spurred the development, led by David Shakow, of the “Boulder Model” of clinical training, with its emphasis on producing not mere clinicians (like training of physicians did) but “scientist-practitioners” who, it was hoped, would heal the long-standing rift between “pure” and “applied” psychology by working both as primary researchers and as front-line practitioners. It is the model that governs much of the clinical PhD curriculum in America to this very day.⁵⁵

5. Public Schools and the Invention of the Psychological Clinic

As important as the appearance of the Emmanuel movement and the arrival of psychoanalysis were, mental disorder was hardly the only pressing issue of the early 20th century that called out for an application of psychological knowledge. The challenges posed by the ever-expanding system of universal schooling created another arena in which psychologists could readily apply their skills. Among the most difficult of these challenges was dealing with children who had trouble with the standardized curriculum that any public school system had to employ. When children failed to learn as expected, it was often not immediately clear why, especially in an environment as tumultuous as a large, turn-of-the 20th-century American city. Are the children able to see and hear clearly? Do they understand the language of instruction? Are they well cared for at home? Is some sort of domestic crisis distracting them? And finally, do they have the general mental ability required to cope with the material of their grade level?

Having to deal with hundreds of thousands of students at a time, urban public school systems often did not have the capacity to sort through these various alternatives. What was needed was a new institution dedicated to sorting these problems out, staffed with professionals who could assess pupils and make recommendations. Often enough, this new institution would be expected to then carry out the treatment, whatever it might be, as well. As mentioned in passing earlier, Lightner Witmer was the person who had first attacked this challenge in an organized, systematic way. Working out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he had been professor since 1893, Witmer opened what he called a “psychological clinic,” in 1896. He gradually gathered together a number of different professionals—physicians, social workers, educators, and, of course, psychologists—to serve the needs of Philadelphia’s public schools. Although he is often billed as the “father of clinical psychology,” his work was, in fact, more closely akin to what we, today, would call “school psychology.”

Witmer had been born in 1867 to a Pennsylvania “Dutch” family of long standing in Lancaster County.⁵⁶ His father had been a pharmacist who founded and operated a successful wholesale drug company.⁵⁷ Although business was the main source of their wealth, education seems to have been the family’s main aspiration: Witmer and all three of his siblings attained higher degrees. He attended the prestigious Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia from the age of 13. In 1884 he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in Arts. The main development on campus at that time was the opening of the graduate school which, in short order, came under the direction of the philosopher George Stuart Fullerton. Witmer’s main interest during the last two years of his undergraduate degree were finance and political economy, but it seems likely that he was also exposed to Hermann Lotze’s Outlines of Psychology in Fullerton’s course on “Logic and Psychology.”⁵⁸ After graduating in 1888, Witmer taught English and history at a local private school and, then, in 1889, he began graduate work back at Penn in politics, though in the Philosophy Department. It just so happened that, at about this time, James McKeen Cattell arrived to become Penn’s first instructor in psychology in the same department.

Cattell began to equip his new laboratory, and Witmer took an interest in the novel field. He became Cattell’s paid laboratory assistant for the 1890–91 school year. Before the year was out, though, Cattell had accepted Columbia’s lucrative offer to move there. Not wanting to give up on its new graduate program in experimental psychology—no doubt encouraged by Fullerton and Cattell—the university agreed to support Witmer while he completed his PhD in Leipzig, under Wundt, on the condition that he return to be the university’s lecturer in psychology for at least three years afterwards.⁵⁹ Witmer agreed to the promising deal. Interestingly, foreshadowing his future direction, Witmer took a number of courses in pedagogy while in Leipzig. His dissertation project, suggested by Wundt, was a series of experiments on the aesthetic value of the Golden Section.⁶⁰ This was a continuation of work that had been started in Leipzig by Gustav Fechner, the founder of both psychophysics and of experimental aesthetics.⁶¹ Fechner had died just four years prior to Witmer’s arrival in Leipzig, and he actually called upon the late scientist’s widow for materials that were related to his study.⁶² Witmer completed his doctorate in 1892 and, in the fall of that year, took up the promised lectureship at Penn.⁶³ Later that winter, he presented two research papers at the first annual meeting of the APA, hosted at Penn by his departmental chair, Fullerton. In 1893, Witmer graduated his first PhD, Caspar Wistar Miller, whose dissertation was also on experimental aesthetics. In 1894 Witmer was promoted to assistant professor and, that same year, he taught a course on child psychology for the first time. In 1895, the APA meeting returned to Penn, this time with his old mentors, Cattell and Fullerton, as president and president-elect, respectively.

Although 1896 is conventionally given as the year Witmer “founded” his psychological clinic, there was no formal event as such. As he told the story,⁶⁴ he offered a seminar on psychology for teachers in 1895–96. In March of 1896, one of the students in that course, Margaret T. McGuire, brought up in class the case of a 14-year-old student she was teaching who was unable to spell, though he seemed to have normal mental abilities otherwise. Witmer proposed to have the student, whom he codenamed “Charles Gilman,” brought to his laboratory with the hope of uncovering the precise nature of his difficulty. Witmer noted that Charles’ disability was not limited to spelling; he actually had a profound inability to read or write. One of the more telling symptoms was that he often mistook similar-looking words for each other (e.g., “was” for “saw”). Witmer decided to have the boy’s vision checked by a physician. Charles did have a mild vision problem, but correcting it did not solve his word-identification problem. Witmer decided to embark on a course of intensive training on word-recognition for Charles. By the following spring, there was great improvement—he was able to read some from the newspaper, though he still suffered from occasional word confusions and, when writing, letter transpositions (e.g.,“htat” for “that”). Witmer continued to follow Charles for years afterwards, reporting steady improvement, to the point that Charles could read “great” novelists such as Alexandre Dumas and Honoré de Balzac (presumably in translation) by the age of 21. Charles graduated from school at 17 and then entered a trade school, where a talent for drawing served him well. Unfortunately, he contracted tuberculosis as a young man and died in 1907 at the age of just 24.

Witmer diagnosed Charles’ condition as “verbal visual amnesia”—an inability to recall the images of words. Though we may quibble with this assessment today, what he had accomplished was of landmark importance: he showed that an apparent spelling problem was, instead, a defect in visual and cognitive processing apparently related exclusively to the verbal domain. The defect could be improved, but only by a person, like Witmer, who had specialized knowledge of psychological assessment and treatment. Obvious as this may seem for us, it came as something of a revelation in the 1890s: psychologists could profitably run “clinics” in which their expertise could solve “real world” problems experienced by members of the public.

As word of Witmer’s accomplishment spread, educators around the city began bringing other cases to Witmer’s attention. He consulted on something like two dozen different cases that first year, 1896. Additional assistance was hired to help Witmer manage with the load. One of his favorite aides was a woman named Mary E. Marvin. She was a Philadelphia teacher who had independently developed a specialty working with deaf and otherwise disabled children. How she became aware of Witmer is not known—she may have been a student in one of his earliest courses—but she actively participated in Witmer’s program for many years. During the summer, he ran a short laboratory course on child psychology under the university’s “extension” program, intended for the city’s teachers. Over the course of that same year he published an article on his clinical work in an education journal, as well as two others in a medical journal.⁶⁵ At the APA meeting in Boston that December, he called on his colleagues to take up the challenge of applying their knowledge to the workaday challenges facing their fellow citizens.

The power struggle between “pure” and “applied” psychology was underway.⁶⁶ The most immediate response to Witmer was Hugo Münsterberg’s APA presidential address the following year, denouncing applied psychology of all kinds as being premature.⁶⁷ (As we shall see, he would soon reverse his position, becoming one of the most successful, if not always the most perspicacious, appliers of psychological knowledge in America.) The APA resisted the inclusion of applied psychology in its mandate for another half-century.⁶⁸

While Witmer was plumping for the acceptance of his practical psychology, he was also busy attempting to exclude philosophers from the APA. He formally proposed that philosophers be ejected from the organization and that a separate philosophical society be formed. Not able to achieve that end immediately, he proposed that experimentalists leave the APA for a new association. Witmer asked Titchener, who had left the APA already, to take the lead. Titchener demurred at the time but, in 1904, would start a private, invitation-only group that he pointedly called “The Experimentalists” (today, the Society for Experimental Psychology).⁶⁹

In 1897, Witmer hired his younger brother, Ferree, then a Penn graduate student in physiology, and a former undergraduate student of Witmer’s named Albert L. Lewis, to assist with the teaching of courses. The added help enabled Witmer to expand his clinical practice even further. He saw at least 15 new cases that year. He also offered, for the first time, a summer course in which he specifically taught his “clinical method” to students. One measure of the impact that Witmer’s work had on the surrounding scholarly community was that, in the fall of 1897, he was elected to membership in the prestigious American Philosophical Society, a Philadelphia scientific institution dating back to the time of Benjamin Franklin.

With the outbreak of the Spanish–American War in 1898, Witmer volunteered for army duty with the First Troop, Philadelphia City Cavalry. He was stationed in Puerto Rico, but saw no action. He was able to return to his university position before the year was out. Nevertheless, his time in this legendary corps raised his stature within Philadelphia society probably as much as his membership in the Philosophical Society had.

In 1899, Witmer’s clinic picked up where it had been left before the war. Initially he saw clients only once per week. After a time, he ran a daily clinic for a number of weeks at a time, presumably to handle busy periods or to clear backlogs. Decades later, his one-time student, Samuel Fernberger, would relate that Witmer saw most of the clients himself during the first decade of the clinic’s existence, building his own clinical expertise, often seeing about three clients per day.⁷⁰ As Witmer’s reputation grew, he started to be regularly invited to speak to various groups in the Philadelphia area about children and their education. As the most prominent psychological scientist in the city, he was sometimes asked to comment publicly on general issues of the day. In February of 1900, for instance, he was asked about the authenticity of the spiritualist Leonora Piper, who was then being promoted not only by William James, but also by Columbia University philosopher James Hyslop. Witmer deftly poked holes in Hyslop’s account and, more broadly, poured doubt on Piper’s claims of contact with the hereafter.⁷¹

In 1902, Witmer published his first book, Analytical Psychology, which contained instructions on how to conduct a collection of simple experiments. The book’s aim was to facilitate the teaching of scientific psychology in the absence of specialized equipment and laboratories. The text was revised in 1907, and it stayed in print until the 1930s. In 1903, Witmer was promoted to full professor.

In 1904, Witmer was invited by Titchener to become a founding member of his new group, The Experimentalists. When asked who else should be invited, Witmer advised Titchener to exclude Cattell, Baldwin, and Münsterberg for fear that they would be “running the society in the course of a year.” He also agreed with Titchener that women should be excluded from the new organization lest they be offended by the “smoke filled and coatless atmosphere” of a “vigorous association where we can speak out our minds in perfect freedom … owing to the personal attitude which they take even in scientific discussions.”⁷² Women were indeed excluded from the new group, despite the persistent protestations of Christine Ladd-Franklin.⁷³ It was not until 1911 that Titchener would permit two of his female students to even sit outside the door of the meeting room to secretly hear the goings-on. Women would not be permitted into the meeting proper until after Titchener’s death in 1927.⁷⁴ Titchener’s and Witmer’s attitudes are somewhat difficult to fathom, considering how many successful female graduate students and assistants both men supervised.

Despite Titchener’s misgivings about “applied” psychology, he invited Witmer to speak about his work on “backward children” at the Experimentalists’ first meeting in 1904. That same year, Witmer married a staffer at the library of the American Philosophical Society, Emma Repplier. He was 37 years old at the time. In 1905, he began a three-year term on the APA Council. Mary Whiton Calkins became the first woman president of APA at the same time.

By the end of 1906, Witmer had seen nearly 100 distinct clinical cases, and he was ready to raise his operation to the next level. First, he forged formal affiliations with “training schools” for (using the terms of the day) “feeble-minded” and “mentally-deficient” children in the Philadelphia region. Next, he toured major Western cities—Chicago, St. Paul, and Denver—addressing Penn alumni groups on behalf of the university (raising his own public profile with potential donors in the process). Finally, he befriended Mary L. Corzer who, with her husband, J. Lewis Crozer, were wealthy benefactors of hospitals, colleges, and libraries in eastern Pennsylvania. In the winter of 1907, Witmer wrote his new friend a letter asking outright for the staggering sum of $10,000 to support his clinic. She initially balked, but soon agreed to make the entire donation that Witmer had requested.

This enormous boon sent Witmer into a frenzy of activity. He immediately founded a journal, The Psychological Clinic, through which he could to promote his work. The title of his inaugural article, “Clinical Psychology,” may well have been the first time the phrase was used in print.⁷⁵ In that piece, he described his clientele as,

Witmer then described the path that had led him to found his clinic, the kinds of phenomena it typically dealt with, and his own views on the relationships of his new practice to medicine, to pedagogy, and to sociology. In addition to his introductory article, the first volume of the new journal contained 18 other articles (five authored by Witmer himself, including the full account of his first case, “Charles Gilman”). One of these articles was by the Isador Coriat, the Tufts neurologist who was already involved with the Emmanuel Movement that Witmer would excoriate in print just two years later. There were also reviews, news, and commentary.

In addition to the launch of the journal, Witmer massively expanded his core operation: the clinic took on 75 new cases in 1907, rather than the customary 15 or so. Obviously, Witmer could not handle all of these cases personally; he began hiring staff in order to remake his little clinic into a sizeable institution. In 1908, he set up a residential school as a private venture just outside of the city, in Rose Valley, to enable him to give intensive treatment to his most severe cases. This school (and its successor in Devon, PA) became the main focus of Witmer’s efforts for the rest of his career. This larger operation drew ever-widening notice from educators. Requests for assistance began coming to Witmer from across the country. Imitators, inspired by his model, began setting up similar institutions in other cities. In 1909, the university recognized Witmer’s tremendous success by contributing more space for Witmer’s original campus-based clinic. Witmer was himself becoming a kind of national institution.

The expansion and elevation of Witmer’s operation, however, seems to have led to a corresponding swelling of his ego. He began making public pronouncements on the worthiness of others’ efforts to advance the field. For instance, he not only sharply criticized the Emmanuel Movement in print, as we saw above, but he ignited a heated dispute with Münsterberg (who was then developing his own system of psychotherapy), terminating what had, until then, been friendly relations between them.⁷⁷ He also rebuked William James, essentially dismissing him as a relic of the past and notoriously describing him as the “spoiled child of psychology.”⁷⁸ Many in the discipline were unhappy with James’ advocacy of spiritualism and psychical research, thinking that it brought disrepute to psychology, but none went so far as Witmer in also calling his very real contributions to the discipline into question. Completing a kind of “Harvard trifecta,” Witmer decided to denigrate Josiah Royce’s philosophical work as well. The state of his personal relations with other psychologists notwithstanding, Witmer’s career was a great success. Many school children were helped and many important psychologists of the future were first trained in his laboratory, his clinic, and his school.

6. Hall and the “Discovery” of Adolescence

Although Witmer was the first to found a formal clinic for school children, he was far from the only American psychologist working on the psychology of childhood. Hall’s “child study” continued apace, filling volume after volume of Pedagogical Seminary, an educational journal he had launched in 1891. Chicago’s “raid” of his Clark faculty back in 1892 had left the school damaged, but not broken. It carried on, staffed by Hall’s closest loyalists, though now dominated by its schools of psychology and pedagogy. As it did for many American psychologists, evolutionary theory played a key role in Hall’s thinking about childhood and the process of maturation. Unlike nearly every other psychologist, however, it was the theory of one German naturalist in particular that drew Hall’s allegiance. That theory, advanced by Ernst Haeckel of Jena, held that the embryological development of each individual organism repeats, in condensed form, the entire evolutionary history of the species as a whole.⁷⁹ Haeckel sought to establish this extraordinary claim with exquisitely detailed drawings of the in utero growth of diverse animals—a fish, a chicken, a pig, a human. The aim was to show that, at their earliest stages, vertebrate embryos are nearly identical—just as all animals, under Darwinian theory, evolved from a single common ancestor. However, as they develop into fetuses, they begin to diverge from each other, just as their ancient ancestors did (see Figure 9.3). Haeckel coined terms—novel at the time but now in common usage—that would allow him to summarize his theory in a single sentence: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”; the development of the organism follows the same path as did the evolution of its species.

Hall adapted Haeckel’s controversial claim to the theory of mental development: the thought processes and favored activities of (European) children, he claimed, recapitulate those of mature humans earlier in evolutionary history. Indeed, Hall went on, the profound cognitive and cultural differences that he believed to exist between “civilized” peoples and “savage” ones was the result of the (putative) fact that “savages” were still at this earlier stage of development, while “civilized” ones had moved on to a more “advanced” stage.⁸⁰ Stated this bluntly, the very idea makes Hall seem quite extreme in his racism. While obviously most people today would not countenance his stark distinction between “civilized” and “savage,” Hall’s view of “primitives,” was more charitable and protective (if rather condescending) than condemnatory or vicious:

Hall’s acceptance and psychological extension of Haeckel’s view dated back to the start of his career,⁸² but it became more pronounced as his ideas became more elaborately articulated in the early 20th century. It may have reached its pinnacle in 1904, when he published the most important book of his long career, Adolescence.⁸³ The term is common enough today, but it was the impact of Hall and his book that raised it from an obscure bit of technical jargon into a word that everyone now recognizes and understands.

There can be little doubt that the popularity of Hall’s book was the product of two growing national trends: the popular campaign against child labor and the high school movement. After decades of agitation against child labor by workers’ unions, in 1892 the national Democratic Party called for a ban on all labor by children under the age of 15. By the end of the 1890s, John Dewey and Jane Addams had both become outspoken advocates for children’s rights. In 1903, the legendary labor leader Mary Harris “Mother” Jones—the “most dangerous woman in America,” as she was dubbed by West Virginia’s US District Attorney Reese Blizzard—organized the “Children’s Crusade,” a mass march against child labor from Philadelphia to Roosevelt’s home on Long Island (NY). The following year, 1904, saw the founding of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), which called for the abolition of all child labor. The NCLC included in its early membership such luminaries as former USpresident Grover Cleveland and longtime Harvard president, Charles Eliot.

As with Jacob Riis’ work on the New York slums more than decade earlier, the topic of child labor gained widespread popular attention when a photographer, Lewis Hine, visually documented for all to see the dreadful conditions in which many American children were forced to work. Hine was well-educated: he had taken sociology degrees at Chicago and Columbia before becoming a New York City school teacher. He soon quit that job, though, to become a full-time photographer of some of America’s most pervasive, but well-hidden, social challenges. Starting in 1904, he began photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived daily at Ellis Island, the massive immigration-reception center just off Manhattan. Then, in 1908, he took a position as photographer for the NCLC, which is how he came to record the plight of working children, especially in the Carolina Piedmont, a region stretching from New Jersey in the north, through eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and into Georgia and Alabama. It was this work, more than anything else, that made child labor a national issue.

The second trend that drew national attention to the special needs of teenagers was a mass movement to make high school education universal.⁸⁴ Although teenagers had, up to the turn of the 20th century, been widely seen as little more than young adults who should be put to work as soon as possible (but for the few who had the advantages conferred by a privileged background), a slowly growing practice of keeping children in school until the age of 17 or so made evident the special psychological challenges posed by the teenage years. The start of the “high school movement,” usually dated to 1910, arrived a little after Hall’s book was published. But, when adolescence was recognized as a special concern beyond the boundaries of the discipline of psychology, Hall’s monumental work was already there for the movement to draw upon. The book was fortuitously positioned to take advantage of these two swelling political tides.

In two stout volumes, totaling over 1,300 pages, Hall put forth everything that he had learned about mental growth between roughly the ages of 12 and 20. Haeckel’s grip on Hall’s thought was displayed on the very first page, where Hall stated with admirable directness, “Individual growth recapitulates the history of the race.”⁸⁵ Studying adolescence was particularly important for Hall not just because of what it told us about individual development, but also because of what (he thought) it told us about human evolutionary history. He speculated that:

So important was evolution in Hall’s general cast of mind that, nearly 20 years later, he exulted that “there was a kind of mystic prelusion by which Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Haeckel, and even Tyndall were, it seemed to me, prepared for in my philosophic history.”⁸⁷ He even included a photograph of Haeckel his autobiography.

Although Hall’s work was so speculative in places as to make it seem a relic of an earlier era, other younger psychologists were eager to bring modern science to bear on the questions of childhood and education. The same year as Hall published, Adolescence, Thorndike, then at Columbia’s Teachers College, published Theory of Mental and Social Measurements, an early statistics textbook. Although he had made his name in the arena of animal learning, Thorndike changed course once he joined Teacher’s College, becoming a champion of quantification and objective measurement in the field of education.⁸⁸ His oft-quoted motto was, “Whatever exists at all, exists in some amount,” and the measurement of that “amount” was one of his primary goals.⁸⁹

He conducted some of the earliest studies on the inheritance of intellectual ability using twins.⁹⁰ Although he did not distinguish between identical and fraternal twins (the genetic significance of the difference not being understood at the time), he found that twins were more similar in ability on average than non-twin siblings.⁹¹ He would go on to become an early leader in intelligence and standardized achievement testing.⁹² Thorndike also wrote a number of school textbooks, particularly in arithmetic, as well as children’s dictionaries, redesigning them to be more relevant to younger students’ needs.

7. Psychology at the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences

The year 1904 also saw one of the greatest academic conferences in North American history, and psychologists more than played their part. The main event was the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a world’s fair held in St. Louis just 11 years after the Columbian Exposition in Chicago had brought the world to St. Louis’ longtime rival. Perhaps ironically, it was the University of Chicago’s president, William Rainey Harper, who suggested that an International Congress of Arts and Sciences should be held in conjunction with the St. Louis Fair. Plans began two years before, in 1902, with an advisory Board that consisted of Harper, the president of Columbia University (and early APA member) Nicholas Murray Butler, as well as an American diplomat of German birth named Frederick Holls. Simon Newcomb was appointed president of the congress, but the main responsibility for planning the event and inviting European speakers soon fell to none other than Hugo Münsterberg (who was already well acquainted with Holls). Münsterberg, Newcomb, and Chicago sociologist Albion Small drew up a list of some 300 potential speakers, including more than 100 Europeans. Many of the Europeans refused (including Wundt), while others initially agreed to attend, but later withdrew. There was also bitter contention between Germany and France over which of the two rival nations received more invitations. In the end, over a hundred European scholars and scientists came to present their views, including such luminaries as mathematician Henri Poincaré, physicist Ernest Rutherford, and sociologist Max Weber.⁹³

Of all the various disciplinary sections of the Congress, the one closest to Münsterberg’s heart was, of course, the one devoted to psychology. The speakers included Münsterberg himself, naturally, and many figures we have already encountered: Hall, Ladd, Titchener, Cattell, Baldwin, Meyer, Royce, Sanford, and Calkins, along with a promising young lecturer from Chicago named John B. Watson (among others). The impressive European contingent included C. Lloyd Morgan of Bristol, Pierre Janet of the Collège de France, James Ward of Cambridge, Harold Høffding of Copenhagen, and Max Dessoir of Berlin.⁹⁴

Münsterberg had attempted to organize the presentations according to rather abstract “logical” principles (normative, historical, physical, and mental) that were supposed to demonstrate the essential unity of all knowledge. This scheme was opposed by Münsterberg’s fellow committee member, Small, who proposed an arrangement that reflected more humane categories (health, wealth, religion, and harmony in human relationships).⁹⁵ Münsterberg’s plan ultimately held sway, but the matter rankled the pragmatic Americans so greatly that it became a topic of debate in its own right. John Dewey, for instance, criticized the decision in print before even a single talk had been delivered.⁹⁶ James Rowland Angell noted in a summary of the proceedings after the fact that, “the unification of knowledge which this congress was to glorify is, in this department [psychology] at least, is for the most part a figment of the imagination, an ideal toward which progress may ultimately bear us, but from which at the present moment we are conspicuously remote.”⁹⁷

Most of the talks, Angell lamented, opted to take stock of the discipline’s past, “cater[ing] to a retrospective and somewhat obituary attitude of mind.”⁹⁸ The sole exception for Angell was the “delightful persiflage of parts of Mr. Cattell’s paper.”⁹⁹ Cattell’s “brilliant and racy,”¹⁰⁰ talk, openly repudiated Münsterberg’s effort to formally define the boundaries and categories of science. “Sciences are not immutable species, but developing organisms,” he declared.¹⁰¹ Every person, indeed every day, creates its own science and, from among these, “there arises by a kind of natural selection a quasi objective science of psychology.”¹⁰² Like science more broadly, psychology has no set definition either; the psychologist is free to study whatever he likes with whatever methods seem likely to bear fruit. Cattell even dismissed the self-evidence of the distinction between mind and matter, declaring it an empirical matter yet to be worked out, rather than an axiom that the psychologist must accept. “Matter and consciousness may not be two entities set over against each other… . I am not convinced that psychology should be limited to the study of consciousness as such, in so far as this can be set off from the physical world.”¹⁰³

Perhaps the most interesting part of Cattell’s thought here was the nonchalance with which he dismantled the austere vision of pure psychology that had been so assiduously assembled by Titchener over the previous decade:

Not only did Cattell here demolish Titchener’s methodological imperative that introspection is the One True Method of experimental psychology, he also flattened Titchener’s carefully erected barrier between pure and applied psychology: “It may also be true that pure science should precede the applications of science. But of this I am not sure; it appears to me that the conditions are most healthful when science and its applications proceed hand in hand, as is now the case in engineering, electricity, chemistry, medicine, etc.”¹⁰⁵ It is sometimes suggested that Cattell’s comments in St. Louis foreshadowed the coming behaviorist “revolution.” That probably goes too far, however.¹⁰⁶ He was really just stating with admirable succinctness what Titchener’s Functionalist opponents had been saying all along. The difference was that few had said it in quite so blunt a fashion, nor in quite so public a forum. The days of circumspection about Titchener’s Structuralist position were quickly coming to an end.

8. Psychology’s “Discovery” of Women

One of the most obvious human “variations” that had not received much attention in the psychology laboratory was whether women systematically differ from men in their psychological makeup. From the start, psychology had been somewhat more hospitable to women than most sciences.¹⁰⁷ That did not mean, of course, that they had anything approaching real equality. As we saw in earlier chapters, both Christine Ladd-Franklin and Mary Whiton Calkins were denied PhDs by Johns Hopkins and Harvard, respectively, despite having completed the degree requirements. There were no women students in Wundt’s laboratory until Anna Berliner arrived in 1914. Titchener would not allow women into his “Experimentalists” group, despite the fact that four of the six PhD students he graduated at Cornell in the 1890s had been women.¹⁰⁸ Still, women were accepted into most activities of the discipline, such as the APA. Calkins even became the first woman president of the APA in 1905. Washburn would serve as the second, though not until 1921.

Arguments against higher education for women were as many and varied as there were men who did not want women in college classrooms. Some felt that women were simply incapable of higher thought. Others felt that higher education might be positively hazardous to women physically, mentally, and socially (i.e., it would damage their marriage prospects). As a result of the general refusal to accept women in the colleges that already existed, a number of separate women’s colleges were set up in America during the mid-19th century. The first was Mt. Holyoke, founded in 1837. A full bachelor’s degree was not offered to women, however, until the opening of Vassar College in 1865 (where Christine Ladd studied, starting in 1866).

One of the most common beliefs about the psychological differences between women and men in the late 19th century was that men simply had larger brains than women did and, therefore, greater mental ability. There was also a widespread assumption that women’s mental powers tended more toward the instinctual and emotional rather than to the intellectual. As anatomical studies of the brain began to show that, proportionally to their body size, women’s brains were not smaller than men’s (and may even have been proportionally larger), a more refined argument was required.¹⁰⁹

One of the more ingenious was that men were not mentally superior to women overall, but that men displayed greater variation in their mental abilities than women did. This idea, known as the “Variability Hypothesis,” served a couple of distinct rhetorical purposes. First, it explained both why men seemed to rise to greater intellectual heights than women as well as why men also seemed to sink to greater depths of depravity and criminality. Second, it did all this while being able to politely maintain that, on average, women and men are mental equals. It is just that, in practice, women do not rise as far because the range of their abilities is not as great.

In 1891, Joseph Jastrow decided to test this popular hypothesis by asking the students in his one of his classes to write down 100 different words as quickly as they could.¹¹⁰ He found that, collectively, the men chose a somewhat wider range of words than women (1,376 versus 1,123, a difference of about 20%). He took this result as evidence in favor of the variability hypothesis. In 1895, Mary Whiton Calkins and one of her Wellesley students, Cordelia Nevers, decided to attempt a replication of Jastrow’s experiment.¹¹¹ They found that the women students of Wellesley performed much more similarly to Jastrow’s Wisconsin men than to his Wisconsin women. Various explanations for the discrepancy were exchanged,¹¹² and no firm conclusion was reached, but male psychologists were put on notice that female psychologists were prepared to respond—with data—to any claims in this area that they felt were not adequately judicious.

In 1900, a student of Angell’s at Chicago, Helen Bradford Thompson, completed a doctoral dissertation on sex differences. Published in 1903, Thompson made careful tests of motor ability (e.g., reaction time), sensation (in all five traditional modalities), intellect, and affect. Her conclusions were: (1) Men, perhaps not surprisingly, had the advantage in strength, speed, and physical endurance. (2) The results with sensation were mixed, though they favored women slightly. (3) In intellect, women had “decidedly” better memories while men had an advantage in “ingenuity.” (4) There was little measurable difference in the realm of feeling. More important than the brute differences though, were their probable sources. Thompson concluded that what differences there were did not result from inherent disparities in capacity or disposition but, rather, from “differences in the social influence brought to bear on the developing individual from early infancy to adult years.”¹¹³

Some older psychologists, like Stanley Hall, dismissed Thompson’s findings in favor of their old prejudices.¹¹⁴ Some younger psychologists, however, such as Edward Thorndike, welcomed Thompson’s conclusions as authentic contributions to science.¹¹⁵ Kate Gordon, a 1903 doctoral graduate of Chicago, scoffed at the image of women put forward by Hall as positively medieval. In response to the claim that co-education would masculinize women (and possibly effeminize men), Gordon pointed out that, if men and women can marry and live together without harm, then surely they can be in school together for a few hours a day without danger.¹¹⁶ Like many other academic women, Gordon’s career trajectory would not be straightforward. She passed through a number of different short-term teaching jobs over the course of two decades before UCLA finally offered her an associate professorship in 1923, at the age of 45. She was promoted to full professor in 1934.

Indeed, it was not uncommon that, even once women received a graduate education, they were unable to obtain a permanent academic post, except in the women’s colleges. Christine Ladd-Franklin, who had been working since the 1890s with a group called the Association of Collegiate Alumnae to create scholarships for women, was never offered any position better than an unpaid lectureship at Columbia, despite her recognized status in the fields of both logic and color vision. Lillien Jane Martin, a Vassar graduate who attended Göttingen for advanced research, won a permanent position at Stanford in 1899. She was promoted to the rank of professor in 1911, but hers was a very rare case.¹¹⁷

Often, marriage was the critical determinant. Ethel Puffer, for instance, had completed the requirements for a PhD under the supervision of Münsterberg at Harvard in 1898 but, as with Calkins a few years before, the degree had gone unawarded. In 1902 Harvard offered both women a PhD from Radcliffe, Harvard’s extension college for women. Puffer accepted, but Calkins refused, pointing out that she had never attended Radcliffe. Even though Puffer had a PhD, once she married, in 1908, even Columbia’s women’s college, Barnard, refused to hire her.

One of the breakthrough cases was that of Leta Stetter Hollingworth.¹¹⁸ She had become engaged to her University of Nebraska classmate, Harry Hollingworth. When Harry moved to New York to do his PhD at Columbia under Cattell, Leta stayed behind in the Cornhusker State for a time teaching high school. When she finally joined him in New York and the two were wed, she discovered that married women were not allowed to teach in the city’s public schools. With few job prospects, she decided to get a master’s degree in education at Columbia, which she completed in 1913. She then became the first “psychologist,” so titled, in the New York Civil Service, administering intelligence tests to the children who were then termed “mental defectives.” She soon returned to Columbia for a PhD under Thorndike. Her dissertation focused on whether, as was widely believed, women suffered a periodic mental decline during menstruation. She was able to find no evidence of such a phenomenon, and was awarded her degree in 1916.¹¹⁹ Although she was offered a professorship in education at Teacher’s College, her career truly flourished outside of the academy. She became best known for her work with “gifted” children, a term that she coined. She was also instrumental in the organization of the American Association of Clinical Psychologists, a group that came together in 1917 in response to the APA’s refusal, at that time, to admit professional, nonacademic psychologists as members.

9. Münsterberg’s Emergence as “America’s Most Famous Psychologist”

As we saw in the last chapter, during the final years of the 19th century, Harvard’s Hugo Münsterberg was adamantly, even vitriolically, opposed to the application of psychological knowledge to everyday realms such as education.¹²⁰ As the century turned, though, he reversed his opinion and declared that scientific psychology had now progressed far enough to be effectively applied, after all. It is easy to suggest that Münsterberg’s exposure to attitudes in the US, and perhaps a desire to fit in to his new home, explained his profound change of heart. However, there is little indication that Münsterberg’s guiding presumption that American “culture” was inherent inferior to German Kultur had changed. Instead, the trigger for his about-face was more probably the recent appearance of prominent psychologists in Germany who had begun to pursue practical psychology in a diverse array of fields.

Wundt had long frowned upon applied psychology and the related study of individual differences. His fear had been that, in the German educational context of the time, emphasizing practical knowledge would undermine experimental psychology’s claim to be a natural science and, as such, a university discipline. Such a diminishment of its status would, under the Prussian system, have consigned the topic to the technical schools, a fate that Wundt would never have accepted for himself.

By the start of the 20th century, however, the climate had changed somewhat, and William Stern—a professor at Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland) who had once been a student of the memory research pioneer Hermann Ebbinghaus in Berlin—published a book titled Uber Psychologie der individuellen Differenzen (The Psychology of Individual Differences) in 1900 without any notable harm to his academic reputation.¹²¹ Stern, who would later invent the idea of the intelligence quotient (IQ), followed his book on individual differences with a 1903 article called “Angewandte Psychologie” (Applied Psychology).¹²² Soon after, he would establish an entire journal, Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie (Journal of Applied Psychology) and, in 1906, he would co-found an Institute in Berlin devoted to the topic.

Other Germans soon followed Stern’s lead. Ernst Meumann, for instance, was a former student of Wundt’s who had taken his old professor’s position at Zurich in 1896. He did not hold to the Leipzig model of a purely experimental psychology, however. He pointedly founded a journal for “the whole of psychology” (Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie) in 1903 to succeed Wundt’s Philosophische Studien. In 1911 he co-founded a journal dedicated to the explicitly applied topic of educational psychology (Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie und Experimentelle Pädagogik).

With this newfound Imperial German approval, applied psychology could now be regarded as a legitimate pursuit for even so upright and eminent a professor as Münsterberg. The Harvard man quickly scrambled to become the leader of the field he had, for so long, dismissed as worthless. The approval of his fellow Germans may not have been the only reason that Münsterberg suddenly embraced the applied form of the discipline so enthusiastically. In March of 1905, he was finally offered what he had always most sought: a German professorship. The call came from Königsberg, a provincial university in far northeastern Prussia, but the chair had once been held by Immanuel Kant, and the location was not far from his childhood home. Also, once ensconced back in Germany, it was possible that he would be called to more prestigious positions in due course. Münsterberg vacillated. German colleagues told him it was time for him to come home to finally claim his due. American colleagues, however—including some who, like him, had emigrated from Germany—advised him to stay in America where the social and intellectual strictures were less confining than in his homeland. At first, he tentatively accepted the job, pending permission to stay at Harvard for one more year; he had been the driving force behind the construction of a new building for philosophy and psychology at Harvard, Emerson Hall, and he wished to see the project through to its completion.¹²³ After further consideration, though, he withdrew his acceptance of the Königsberg chair, telling both his prospective employer and himself that his talents would go to better use in America than they would in Germany. Having decided to permanently throw his lot in with America, applied psychology, crudely technical as it might have seemed before, now appeared as the most opportune path to (ever greater) professional status and public prominence in his adopted home.

The following year, 1906, there was a sensational murder case in Chicago. A man, possibly of limited intellectual capacity, had confessed to the murder of a young woman, under the sway of police interrogation. The accused, Richard Ivins, was sentenced to death for the crime. Ivins’ defense attorney claimed that the confession was false and had been the result of hypnotic suggestion. He called upon various “experts” to publicly comment on the case. James and Münsterberg both published opinions. James called for more investigation. Münsterberg, by contrast, proclaimed his certainty, on the basis of the written record alone, that Ivins was innocent and that “dissociation and auto suggestion” had been at play in the confession.¹²⁴

The Harvard professors’ interventions were ignored by the courts of Illinois, and Ivins was executed as scheduled. Nevertheless, with this declaration of special expertise, Münsterberg began to publicly develop a theory that the American justice system was hidebound by ancient assumptions about the value of “common sense.” The time had finally come, he thought, to favor the testimony of specialists who were better equipped than ordinary witnesses to protect their perceptions and conclusions from bias and distortion.¹²⁵ Some psychologists agreed, but the legal community, by and large, strenuously opposed the German professor’s view.¹²⁶

In 1907, Münsterberg continued this new line of work, becoming involved in another high-profile murder case, this time in Idaho. “Big Bill” Haywood was a national labor leader who had just, in 1905, founded the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization that was widely seen as being more “radical” than traditional unions (mainly because its sheer size threatened the possibility of a general strike that could bring industries across the country to a halt). Haywood was accused of having ordered the murder of a former governor of Idaho named Frank Steunenberg. The accusation came, interestingly enough, from the actual assassin, a man named Harry Orchard. Orchard had originally denied involvement, but had been interrogated by none other than James McParland, the Pinkerton investigator who had putatively “broken” the notorious Molly McGuires case thirty years earlier.¹²⁷ McParland promised Orchard leniency if he fingered those who had put him up to the crime. Orchard named those who McParland and Idaho government officials most wanted to implicate—a group of Western labor leaders that included Haywood. There was no physical evidence connecting Haywood to the Steunenberg case, and only tenuous connections between Haywood and Orchard, but McParland arranged to have Haywood arrested in Denver and secretly spirited out of Colorado to Idaho before the courts could intervene.

The case became a national sensation, and the popular magazine McClure’s commissioned Münsterberg to set forth his views on the case. Münsterberg traveled to Idaho with a box full of laboratory equipment. After ingratiating himself to local officials there, he was permitted to visit Orchard in jail. Once inside, Münsterberg proceeded to test the truth of Orchard’s accusations. Even as a laboratory psychologist of long experience, there were no standard methods for Münsterberg to call upon to assess “truth.” He was, however, deeply impressed by the potential of the timed word-association test that Carl Jung had recently developed to assess psychopathology.¹²⁸ The idea was that it normally takes a certain amount of time, when presented with a word, for a person to generate another word that is associated with it (e.g., dog-cat, hot-cold). However, if there is a mental conflict associated with the word presented, the time it takes to produce an associate interval might be lengthened or otherwise distorted. For instance, if the tester says “blood” and the subject delays even a fraction of a second longer than he normally would in coming up with a related word, the subject’s normal mental processes may have been disrupted by a disturbing event that he associates with blood—for instance, a murder that he committed.

After testing Orchard in this and various other ways, Münsterberg became convinced that his accusations were true, that Haywood was guilty of ordering the murder. In the article he wrote for McClure’s, however, he was more circumspect about his findings.¹²⁹ This turned out to be a wise choice, for Haywood had something better going for him than Münsterberg’s chronoscope. He had the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow leading his defense team. Darrow eviscerated Orchard on the stand, forcing him to confess not only to other bombings before he had ever even met Haywood, but also to having accepted cash from the Pinkerton Agency for his incriminating confession. With Orchard’s credibility destroyed, Haywood was acquitted.

Even if Münsterberg has been wrong about Orchard, he had simultaneously managed to create the field of forensic psychology, virtually out of thin air. He quickly collected together various magazine articles he had written on the topic and produced a book: On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime.¹³⁰ The book’s most explosive contention was that a longtime mainstay of American jurisprudence—the assumption that the eyewitness is a nearly infallible source of evidence—was deeply flawed. He described a plethora of ways, known primarily only to laboratory psychologists, whereby people can be fooled by tricks of perception and cognition, into being certain they have witnessed things that did not really happen (at least, not as they remember them). In undermining the credibility of eyewitnesses, he simultaneously put forward the corollary that psychologists are uniquely qualified by their scientific training to tell which witnesses are correct and which are deluded.

The idea that truth could be “scientifically” distinguished from falsehood quickly caught on with the press and with the public. Münsterberg continued to develop his popular new craft. He experimented with muscular twitches of the hand, as well as changes in breathing rate and vascular pulse as signs of possible deception. One of Münsterberg’s students, William Moulton Marston (BA 1915, PhD 1921) would later develop the idea that changes in blood pressure were an even better means of lie detection.¹³¹ Marston’s discovery would soon be included in the “polygraph” developed by John Larson, a Canadian psychologist hired by the Berkeley police who is often identified as the inventor of the “lie detector.” Marston would go on to a fascinatingly unorthodox life and career developing, among other things, the cartoon character Wonder Woman who, notably, could compel confessions from criminals with her Golden Lasso of Truth.¹³²

Münsterberg’s work in this line became so well known that his persona served as the basis of a series of popular short stories written by two Chicago Tribunewriters (and brothers-in-law) Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg. Their main character, Luther Trant, was an advanced psychology student who used the equipment and techniques of the experimental psychology laboratory to crack crimes that had stumped the police. The stories were originally published serially in Hampton’s Magazine, in 1909 and 1910, and were later collected together in book form.¹³³ Interestingly, Balmer also authored a slim volume titled The Science of Advertising, a topic to which Münsterberg would also make important contributions.¹³⁴ Balmer probably achieved his greatest fame later, in 1933 when he co-authored with Philip Wylie the science fiction novel When Worlds in Collide (and its 1934 sequel, After Worlds Collide). He would also edit the popular women’s magazine Redbook from 1927 to 1949.

Although forensics was where Münsterberg made his first splash in applied psychology, it was far from the only practical area into which he enthusiastically threw himself. As we saw earlier, he was involved in the debate over the Emmanuel Movement, writing a book of his own on psychotherapy in which he claimed to have successfully treated hundreds of patients.¹³⁵ The book came out at a time when no less an authority than Adolf Meyer complained that, “psychotherapy is in the air and wildly exploited in the book-market and in magazines.”¹³⁶ In short, it was precisely the kind of topic that would enable Münsterberg to have more public impact. He could not choose between the tugs of two different audiences—the professional and the popular—so he wrote Psychotherapy with the hope of appealing to both audiences. In the first part, he set forth an array of abstract foundations that even the author admitted would probably bore or baffle the novice reader, but interest the expert. It was followed by a section in which he described various mental conditions and their treatments. He thought might would be more interesting (and perhaps more entertaining) to a lay audience. Reviewing the book, Meyer concluded that Münsterberg had failed, though sometimes in interesting ways, to achieve his goal of satisfactorily addressing the two diverse audiences simultaneously; that it would have been better if he had simply written two books.

Münsterberg’s primary biographer, Mathew Hale, characterized his approach to psychotherapy as “functional,” though the Harvard professor did not openly align himself with the Functionalist psychologists of his day, even though the influence of that school of thought was then at its high point.¹³⁷ Indeed, Münsterberg explicitly distanced himself from Adolf Meyer, saying that psychotherapy was “sharply to be separated” from psychiatry.¹³⁸ Psychiatry was to be reserved for serious “mental disease,” while the psychotherapy was for “the mild abnormalities of mind, and especially the nervous disturbances which exist outside the field of insanity.”¹³⁹ More philosophically, or perhaps just enigmatically, he also claimed that psychotherapy was “the last word of the passing naturalistic movement, and yet in another way tries to be the first word in the coming idealistic movement.”¹⁴⁰

Jousting with psychiatry was not his primary object, though. He aimed, rather at demarcating the boundary between psychiatry’s “turf” and his own. The faction he most vehemently opposed was, instead, psychoanalysis, which was just beginning to receive a hearing in the psychiatric world. He felt that Freud’s emphasis on unconscious motivation was utterly misguided. “The story of the subconscious mind,” he bluntly proclaimed, “can be told in three words: there is none.”¹⁴¹ So complete was his contempt for the rising Viennese star that, nearly alone among prominent eastern-US psychologists, Münsterberg did not attend Freud’s and Jung’s appearances at Clark in 1909, preferring to vacation in Canada instead.

Rather than delving into the subconscious, Münsterberg’s approach to therapy was to adjust outward conduct so that it better suited societal demands. He was promiscuous when it came to method. Sometimes he used hypnosis, sometimes direct instruction, sometimes drugs. Even an appeal to religious ideas, though fraught with dangers in Münsterberg’s opinion, could sometimes be put to effective use.¹⁴² In his mind, all of these techniques drew their legitimacy from being tied back to the findings of “scientific” psychology. He did not consider the speculations of Freud and others, even if based upon individual cases, to be an adequate basis for valid theorizing.

Beyond forensics and psychotherapy, Münsterberg also made sizeable contributions to the burgeoning fields of vocational guidance and testing. He became involved with the Boston Vocation Bureau, an enterprise pioneered by a lawyer and social reformer named Frank Parsons. As with his forays into law and therapy, Münsterberg again argued that scientific training imbues the psychologist with an ability to discern a person’s best vocational path, even when the subjects themselves may be unable to see it.¹⁴³ He eventually wrote two textbooks on the topic.¹⁴⁴ He also contributed to the early psychological study of business and industry, as we shall see next chapter.

It seems that Münsterberg felt that nary a topic was beyond the possibility of his beneficent intervention. As popular sentiment began to grow in favor of the prohibition of alcohol, for instance, the eminent professor weighed in publicly to argue that prohibition would likely bring with it a number of negative social and psychological side effects that would ultimately outweigh the evil it had been intended to correct.¹⁴⁵ The alcohol question had, of course, for decades been a source of tension between “old stock” Protestant Americans on the one hand, and newer immigrant groups from Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere. Münsterberg’s article, measured and reasonable though it seemed, led to scandal when it was revealed that he had received funds for a number of his Harvard research projects from one of the leading brewers of beer in the US, Adolphus Busch (a fellow German emigrant). There is no evidence that Münsterberg was paid in advance to promote the cause; his positions were his own.¹⁴⁶ However, the appearance of collusion was difficult to erase, and Münsterberg’s perhaps overly-broad denials led to a growing public suspicion of his motives that soon threatened to topple both the popular and academic statures that he had worked so assiduously to attain.

Although Münsterberg’s Harvard colleague, William James, is widely and correctly praised for the humaneness of his thought, it is interesting to contrast Münsterberg’s growing interest, during the first decade of the 20th century, in problems that beset urban America—crime, labor strife, vocation, business, alcoholism—with James’ general aloofness from them. However humane James might have been, his chief interests seemed to grow ever more esoteric and abstract.

Relations between James and Münsterberg had become increasingly strained over the years—the Emerson Hall dispute was mentioned above—but the matter that finally led to a permanent break between them was, of all things, the authenticity (or not) of a popular Italian spiritualist named Eusapia Palladino. Palladino was one of the most celebrated mediums in the world at the time. The strange thing was that she had already been caught using fraudulent methods, but her supporters were mostly undeterred, dismissing these embarrassments as mere attempts to enhance the impact of her true abilities. William James was among her apologists. The manager of her American sojourn was a British-born magazine editor named Hereward Carrington. Carrington was also an assistant to a prominent psychical researcher and Columbia University philosopher-psychologist named James Hyslop.

Carrington invited several American scientists, including Münsterberg, to observe Palladino’s séances and evaluate her abilities. At first they agreed, on the condition that they would be able to conduct controlled experiments, but they soon got word that they would only be passive observers and, worse still, that Carrington was using their agreement to participate as an advertising gimmick. Almost all of them withdrew.¹⁴⁷ Münsterberg, however, prodded by James, agreed to attend a séance despite his skepticism of the entire event. It took place a week before Christmas in 1909. Many of the standard spiritualist phenomena were manifested—strange raps and knocks, inexplicable gusts of wind, unexplained bulging of curtains, etc. Münsterberg noted, however, that they all occurred no more that three feet from the medium, never in a more distant part of the room. Then, in the midst of the session, one of Münsterberg’s assistants, while checking for wires under the furniture, caught Palladino’s flesh-and-bone foot in the act of attempting to “levitate” a table.¹⁴⁸

Münsterberg, now more convinced than ever that Palladino was a fraud, wrote an article exposing her trickery and published it in the February, 1910 issue of Metropolitan Magazine.¹⁴⁹ James was beside himself with fury. He tried to excuse what even he described as her “detestable” performance as just another instance of her gilding the lily of her authentic powers. In a letter to the British physicist and fellow spiritualism-enthusiast Oliver Lodge, he called Münsterberg’s piece a “buffoon article.”¹⁵⁰ To Palladino’s American manager he called it “disgraceful.”¹⁵¹ To the French psychologist Théodore Flournoy, he described it as “infamous.”¹⁵² But even this storm of defensiveness could not change the facts. A few weeks later, Wisconsin psychologist Joseph Jastrow snuck two hidden observers under the table of a Palladino séance where she did not know she was being tested and caught her rigging the game even more flagrantly than Münsterberg had. The jig was up; Palladino was revealed to be a fraud.

10. James’ Final Philosophy

William James did not often make public appearances at overtly political events, but in October of 1904 he took the stage at the Universal Peace Conference, which was held in Boston.¹⁵³ The conference was but one manifestation of a popular peace movement that had arisen in the US in the aftermath of the Spanish–American War, and in opposition to the bellicose pronouncements of the new president, Teddy Roosevelt. The war had, at a stroke, transformed the US from a nation that viewed itself as largely neutral and isolationist into a burgeoning imperial power, with colonies not only in the nearby Gulf of Mexico, but also in the far flung South Pacific.

The imposition of American rule in the Pacific had not occurred peacefully. Philippine Revolutionaries, who had already been fighting Spanish colonial rule when the Americans arrived, simply redirected their fight against American forces once it became clear that the US would not be granting independence to the islands. A brutal three-year conflict ensued, causing tens of thousands of Filipino casualties. Reports of terrible atrocities by American forces gradually made their way into the US press despite strenuous efforts by the Army to suppress them. Many Americans simply could not understand how their nation had so swiftly changed from apparent defender of the oppressed into being just the latest in a long line of cruel colonial oppressors.

William James’ exact political leanings have been notoriously difficult to pinpoint. He has been cast by various authors as a social democrat, a radical participatory democrat, a communitarian, a populist, a crypto-capitalist, even an anarchist.¹⁵⁴ In 1884 he had identified with a group of upper-class New Englanders and New Yorkers who could not abide the corruption that clung the Republican candidate for president, James G. Blaine, and so bolted to the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland. They were led by Boston “Brahmin” Adams brothers, Henry and Charles Jr., and they came to be called the Mugwumps. James’ university president, Charles Eliot, counted himself among their number as well. Even here, James was an uncomfortable fit. The Mugwumps mostly abandoned the Democratic Party when it nominated populist William Jennings Bryan for the first time in 1896, but James had some positive things to say about Bryan, though he did not actively support him. On the other hand, Mugwumps were at the forefront of the Anti-Imperialist League when it launched in 1898, the political movement to which James devoted himself most publicly.

True to his natural cast of mind, James began to theorize about why war had such a strong psychological appeal that it seemingly could not be suppressed by even the most “advanced” civilizations. His speech at the Universal Peace Conference of 1904 began a line of thought on this matter that led to a famous 1906 lecture at Stanford titled “The Moral Equivalent of War” which, in 1910, would become James’ very last work published in his lifetime.¹⁵⁵ Whereas most other speakers at the conference aimed to cast war as primitive throwback to an earlier time in human history that held no proper place in “advanced” society, James argued, by contrast, that the adventure and self-sacrifice of war continued to hold an irresistible grip on the human mind. If true, efforts to simply banish it as “beneath” modern civilization would never succeed. Instead, he proposed that we should create new outlets to satisfy these deep psychological needs that did not also result in war’s terrible human consequences. Instead of a war against other humans, he declared, we needed a war against nature in its place:

Although the idea that nature is an enemy that we must, or even can, perennially fight against now seems foolish, James’ “moral equivalent” argument is often seen as the starting point for later national and international service projects, such as the Works Progress Administration developed by Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Peace Corps, founded by the US government in the 1960s.

Direct interventions in public affairs like this were unusual for James. His efforts were more commonly directed at his philosophical projects. The same year as his speech at the Universal Peace Conference, James also published two articles that exploded what was widely taken to be the central concept of psychology: consciousness. The articles appeared in the latest of James McKeen Cattell’s many publishing ventures—The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods—and they immediately established the new periodical’s scholarly reputation. Titled “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience,” the two essays crystalized themes that had run through James’ thought for decades into the explicit foundations for a position that he dubbed “radical empiricism.”¹⁵⁷ This revolutionary stance would constitute the final stop on James’ lifelong philosophical journey. It also baffled many of his most admiring disciples, as well as most his determined critics.

It is a position that is difficult to describe plausibly because it runs contrary to assumptions about the fundamental nature of psychological phenomena that are so deeply-ingrained in our understanding of the mind that they date back to at least Descartes. In 1900, it was common to think of the mind, essentially, as an organ of consciousness; as a thing with a general capacity to receive perceptions and entertain thoughts. Of course, there had been various proposals about unconscious mentality, such as Freud’s, but most agreed on the leading role played by conscious thought. It was the common paradigm against which exotic proposals about unconscious thought and motivation were set. The content of conscious perceptions and thoughts was presumed to arrive in the mind from elsewhere, from “the world” broadly speaking. I see a dog because a dog-in-the-world produces the image of a dog in my sensorium, to a first approximation. I remember my mother because I have a memory of her that I retrieve from some sort of storage and place it before my “mind’s eye.” So basic were assumptions of this sort that they had come to be regarded by many as the fundamental facts of the situation to be explained by psychology, rather than as assumptions. It can be difficult to see how such a thing as “psychology” could even arise if these assumptions were somehow undermined.

This model of mental activity, however, immediately leads to a number of intractable problems. What are we to say about mental contents that do not seem to come from the world of sensation? How do I arrive at general ideas (e.g., of the species “dog,” but not any particular dog)? What of abstract ideas such as numbers and logical relations and morality and truth? Might there be whole separate realms of general and abstract ideas to which my consciousness has some sort of access, though not through my eyes and ears? How could that possibly work? Perhaps most perplexing of all, how is it that these various kinds of mental content could come from the world and connect with a thing as ethereal as consciousness?

It is all well and fine to assume, as many people have, that consciousness is somehow produced by brain activity, but that does not explain how it actually happens. Indeed, it is so difficult to account for that many have presumed exactly the opposite—that the mind is non-physical in some way (e.g., spiritual or Ideal) and that it only interacts with objects of its own kind. Then the question becomes how real dogs become ideal dogs, or vice versa, such that the mind is able take them up. Of course, this second approach is equally founded on assumption.

James sought to break through this centuries-old conundrum by rejecting the dualism—mind versus world—that underpins it. There is no “empty” consciousness that is waiting to be activated by content. There is, instead, just “experience,” a unified thing in which the knower and the known are not distinct parts, except in as much as we decide to abstract them from each other for our own purposes. What is more, experience is not built up of parts like sensations and images and feelings. Those, too, are abstractions that we have created in our effort to understand experience but, in doing so, we have created for ourselves a whole raft of artificial pseudo-problems on which we futilely expend our philosophical and scientific efforts.

Experience for James was not only unified but continuous: it flows smoothly through time from moment to moment. The transitions from one mental “state” to the next are every bit as much a part of experience as the parts we call “states.” But, too often, in our analyses, we eliminate these transitional experiences at the outset in order to simplify the situation, only to later wonder what has happened to them as our theoretical project begins to expand. Think, for instance, of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who declared that our experience of an apple is really just a “bundle” of the sensations of redness, roundness, crispness, sweetness, etc.¹⁵⁸ How the bundle comes to be integrated by our mind into a unified idea—the apple—then became a philosophical problem of some import. So another philosopher such as Immanuel Kant then comes along to declare that the very things Hume had called into question are, in fact, “transcendental concepts of the understanding” that form a priori conditions for any sort of understanding: unity, substance, reality, existence, etc.¹⁵⁹ And so the centuries-old dispute between empiricism and Idealism heads off into yet another round of abstruse claim and counterclaim.

According to James, however, this was all based on a false premise, a problem that we had created ourselves by artificially decomposing our naturally unified experience of the apple into its supposedly “elementary” components. “This is the strategic point,” James declared, “the position through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into philosophy.”¹⁶⁰ And it was James’ principal aim at the end of his career to salvage philosophy from the elaborate constructions that philosophers from Plato to Aquinas to Descartes to Kant to Hegel had, for centuries, erected to remedy problems that were, in reality, not of the world’s making but of our own.

Although James had a number of prominent figures on his side (with certain variations in the details)—Dewey, most notably, along with James’ own former students Edwin B. Holt and Ralph B. Perry—there were large numbers of equally accomplished thinkers who simply found it to be puzzling and incomprehensible.¹⁶¹ James’ explication of “experience” did not come with an instruction manual for how psychology was to proceed if, indeed, he succeeded in obliterating its core concept of consciousness. While James’ ideas about the unity and continuity of experience were picked up by some thinkers in the decades to come, the discipline of psychology was left with the urgent matter of finding or assembling a new conceptual foundation, lest it be reabsorbed as a special topic of physiology, on the one hand, and philosophy on the other.

As things turned out, James’ demolition of consciousness was far more persuasive than his proposal to replace it with experience. Experience was not a thing that could easily be subjected to experiment. Instead, he had thrown psychology into a period of turmoil and had unintentionally set the stage for the rise of a new kind of psychology—one that would replace the problematically “subjective” idea of consciousness with the seemingly more “objective” one of behavior.¹⁶²

11. Upheavals in the Disciplinary Landscape

The 1900s were not only a time for profound change in psychology intellectually, but also institutionally.¹⁶³ During the first few years of the existence of the American Psychological Association, the debates continued about what kinds of talks should be allowed at meetings and what kinds of people should be granted membership. Most of the original APA members had been trained in philosophy departments, and many of them did their research in areas that had not yet succumbed to the experimental imperatives of the age. Should these people be forced out into the academic wilderness—there were no philosophical associations at the time—or should the APA be as inclusive as possible in an effort to recruit as many academic allies as possible?

In 1900, a group of 46 philosophers and psychologists formed a new scholarly society called the Western Philosophical Association (WPA). They elected Missouri philosopher Frank Thilly as their president and held their first meeting at the University of Nebraska in January of 1901. Despite the various efforts to evict or segregate the philosophers in the APA, these pressures were not the main reason the western philosophers banded together to form a separate organization. This can be seen from an examination of the two groups’ memberships. In 1900, only 10 of the 125 members of the APA lived west of the Mississippi, and only six of those joined the WPA. Of those six, four were laboratory psychologists: George Patrick and Carl Seashore of Iowa, Harry Wolfe of Nebraska, and Max Meyer of Missouri. Thus, the main reason for the formation of the WPA appears to have been geographical rather than intellectual. The westerners felt remote from the APA, which had always met at an eastern school, and they felt the need for something closer to home. Apparently, geographical concerns of this sort had already arisen within the APA: Wisconsin’s Joseph Jastrow proposed at the 1899 meeting that the 1901 meeting be held in Chicago, which the association agreed to. What is more, at the APA meeting of 1900, a motion was approved to empower members to “organize themselves into a local section for the holding of meetings.” A “Western Branch” of the APA was immediately formed, holding its first meeting in Chicago in 1902.¹⁶⁴

The WPA was not to be the only philosophical association in America. Just a year after it formed, in 1902, an American Philosophical Association—a new APA—came together around the leadership of James Creighton, a philosopher at Cornell. The new group’s founding membership was a robust 98. Of those, 62 were already members of the American Psychological Association. Three decades later, the psychologist Samuel Fernberger reported that, with the creation of a philosophical association in the east, “the number of philosophical papers [presented at the psychological association meetings] dropped to almost zero.”¹⁶⁵ Still, there was no mass exodus from the old APA to the new one. The psychological association actually added eight members the following year. It appears that the philosophers merely added a membership in the new APA to their prior affiliation with the older one. What is more, a number of prominent psychologists joined the new philosophical association, including Hall, Ladd, Baldwin, Cattell, Dewey, Münsterberg, Calkins, Washburn, Thorndike, and Woodworth.

The real surprise is that William James did not join. “I don’t foresee much good from a philosophical society,” he groused. “Philosophical discussion proper only succeeds between intimates who have learned how to converse by months of weary trial and failure. The philosopher is a lone beast dwelling in his individual burrow,” he declared. “Count me out!”¹⁶⁶ His early griping aside, James did eventually join the American Philosophical Association, in 1904, perhaps at the behest of his longtime Harvard colleague and friend, Josiah Royce, who served as president that same year. Ladd was president after Royce, then Dewey. James eventually capitulated entirely, becoming president of the new APA in 1906–1907. He was immediately followed by Münsterberg. So, all the grumbling in the 1890s about philosophy being on the psychological association’s program notwithstanding, the memberships of the two associations were intricately interwoven through first decade of the 20th century.

In 1905, a fourth group was added to the first three, the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SSPP).¹⁶⁷ The South presented a particular challenge. The region’s colleges had long resisted the modernization that had been seen elsewhere in the country since the end of the Civil War. Indeed, in 1890, one Southern candidate for governor had run, and won, on the campaign promise of shutting down his state’s public university.¹⁶⁸ As one Atlanta historian of the time put matters:

The new SSPP—led by Edward F. Buchner, then at the University of Alabama,¹⁷⁰ and James Mark Baldwin, who had just moved from Princeton to Johns Hopkins—aimed, in part, to revive a portion of the Southern educational establishment. Unlike the WPA and the two APAs, which separated philosophy and psychology, the SSPP sought to keep them together. It is hard to tell to what degree this was an explicit desideratum, and to what degree is was simply a practical matter of building a large enough membership to keep the group viable—the SSPP began with only 36 members in 1905. Just seven of those 36 were also members of the American Psychological Association.

Even with the arrival of these philosophical organizations, some experimental psychologists remained dissatisfied with the scientific “purity” of the APA. Chief among these was Cornell’s Edward Titchener, who had once lamented that “the retirement of the experimentalists,—emphasized further by the proposal to devote a certain amount of the time of each meeting to philosophical enquiries,—cannot but be regretted.”¹⁷¹ As we have already seen, in 1904, Titchener invited a small number of psychology laboratories—he left it to the laboratory directors to decide which of their assistants and students to bring along—to join him at Cornell as “The Experimentalists,” to speak frankly of their scientific endeavors in a casual “smoke filled and coatless atmosphere.”¹⁷²

With the rise of more organizations, each with its own particular mission, there came an increasing specialization of the discipline. The first decade of the 20th century also saw a new generation of psychologists gradually take over the leadership of the field. Dewey was elected president of the APA for 1899. After him, the presidents from 1900 to 1903 were Joseph Jastrow of Wisconsin, Josiah Royce of Harvard, Edmund C. Sanford of Clark, and William Lowe Bryan of Indiana. Then, in 1904, William James became the first person to serve as APA president for a second time. The year 1905 saw Mary Whiton Calkins become the first woman president of any of these four organizations. She would also go on to become the first woman president of the American Philosophical Association, in 1918–1919. The APA presidents of 1906 to 1909 were James Rowland Angell, by then head of the psychology department at Chicago; Henry Rutgers Marshall, a New York architect who was academically unaffiliated at the time, George M. Stratton, then at Johns Hopkins, and Charles Hubbard Judd, the newly appointed director of the Department of Education at Chicago.¹⁷³

Beneath the level of APA executives, a wider, if not quite so obvious, “changing of the guard” was underway in psychology during the 1900s. Probably the most visible individual change was Dewey’s departure from Chicago in 1904. This was the result of an unpleasant series of conflicts that were first set in motion by the death in 1902 of Francis Wayland Parker. Parker, it will be recalled, was the man who had first pioneered “progressive education” in Quincy, Massachusetts back in the mid-1870s, then led the Boston school system through a progressive reform starting in 1880. He had come to Chicago in 1883 to launch a similar transformation of the Cook County Normal School where he would train a generation of young teachers in the new approach.¹⁷⁴ Although Parker was able to institute many reforms at the Normal School, being a public institution, there were continual political battles to be fought and compromises to be made. In 1899, an heiress to the enormous riches of the McCormick Harvester empire, Anita Blaine, offered Parker the fantastic sum of one million dollars to set up a private teachers college instead. The offer appealed to Parker because it would free him from entanglements with Illinois’ notoriously corrupt politicos. The Chicago Institute, as the new facility came to be called, was originally conceived as an independent professional school, but University of Chicago’s president, William Rainey Harper, persuaded Parker and Blaine to affiliate it with the university, to enhance the prestige of both.

This situation posed several problems for Dewey. First, his famed Laboratory School, was in perpetual financial difficulty. It had never been able to balance its books and, apart from an initial start-up grant, Harper had consistently refused Dewey’s requests to fund its operation with university money. The Laboratory School was wholly dependent on tuition and on private donations. Parker, however, had found an extraordinarily wealthy patron, and Dewey’s school was now going to have to compete, virtually head-to-head, with the elementary school that would be attached to the new, stupendously financed teachers college.

Harper attempted to allay Dewey’s concerns by proposing, in 1901, a division of labor between Parker and Dewey, so that their roles would not come into conflict: Dewey would train principals and pedagogical researchers; Parker would train teachers and run the elementary school necessary to do so. Unfortunately Harper’s scheme would have left the function of Dewey’s Laboratory School on Parker’s side of the ledger, an outcome Dewey could not accept. After months of letter campaigns, public meetings, and other upheaval, Harper allowed Dewey’s school to remain, but the situation was thrown back into crisis when Parker died the following year. Everyone seemed to agree that Dewey was the best person to take over management of Parker’s school, but how that might affect the school’s mission was a concern, especially of the teachers who were loyal to Parker’s original aims.

There are conflicting accounts of what then ensued, but it seems that Dewey acted, if not actually in bad faith, then at least clumsily in a delicate situation. After first seeming to pledge respect for Parker’s mission, he soon attempted to merge the two schools, dismiss (or force out by pay cuts) a number of Parker’s teachers, and then place the amalgamated school under the direction of his wife, Alice (which signaled the replacement of Parker’s mission with that of the Laboratory School). Although Alice Dewey is remembered today for her firm commitment to the cause of social justice, her very certainty in her convictions also made her a difficult person to work for. There is evidence that her high-handed style had caused at least some of the trouble at the Laboratory School, harming its ability to attract and retain both students and high-quality staff.¹⁷⁵

Harper had originally accepted Dewey’s proposal to merge the two schools; indeed, he had proposed it himself not long before, though under different circumstances. He also approved of Alice Dewey becoming principal. Many teachers at Parker’s school, however, regarded the prospect of her becoming their boss with more than a little trepidation. Probably more troubling to Harper was that Anita Blaine, Parker’s primary patron, and now chair of his Institute’s Board of Trustees, was sympathetic to the teachers’ concerns. Dewey was infuriated at what he regarded as interference in his rights as head of the entire Education Department at Chicago. Harper, though, faced with the threat of a teacher revolt and, perhaps more significant, the displeasure of a major financial donor, brokered a compromise in which Alice Dewey was offered a contract as principal but only for one year. During that year, Anita Blaine commissioned a report that described in excruciating detail the many ways in which Alice failed to rise to the difficult situation in which she found herself. Harper asked for Alice Dewey’s resignation at the end of the school year, telling both her and John Dewey that the reason was the conflict of interest that arises when a wife works under her husband’s supervision. That is, Harper used the then-common rationale of nepotism to shield himself from having what would have been an even more fractious discussion about Alice Dewey’s personal and professional inadequacies. It appears than neither of the Deweys learned of the report that was the real cause of her dismissal. Faced with the prospect of being unceremoniously dumped from her position at the end of the contract, Alice Dewey resigned from the school in April 1904

Just days later, John Dewey, who had long distrusted Harper’s motives, resigned from all of his university positions in protest. He immediately wrote to close colleagues in the east about possibilities for a new professorship. His old friend from their days as graduate students at Johns Hopkins, James Cattell, soon arranged for a post at Columbia, which housed what was probably the best conventional education school in the country. It is interesting that Dewey never sought to open a new laboratory school at Columbia. Also, his association with psychology faded as the discipline increasingly differentiated itself from both philosophy and pedagogy. He soon became America’s leading public intellectual, writing many books on the character that education should assume in a democratic society, as well as on more speculative topics such as ethics, epistemology, art, and the nature of experience itself.

Back in Chicago, Nathaniel Butler, a colleague of Harper’s dating back to their days together at the “old” University of Chicago (the Baptist school that had collapsed back in 1886), was appointed Dean of Education in Dewey’s stead, a position he would hold until the arrival of Charles Judd from Yale in 1909. It was not only Education that was left in disarray by Dewey’s departure. He had also been head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology, which was filled with people he had hired, some of them dating back to his days at Michigan. Harper took this opportunity to divide the department in two—another sign that psychology was coming into its own as an independent discipline. James Hayden Tufts was put in charge of the new Department of Philosophy. George Herbert Mead went with him. The new Department of Psychology was placed under the leadership of James Rowland Angell. Angell, who, it will be recalled, came from a distinguished family of university professors and administrators, was promoted to Dean in 1908, but also remained as head of psychology. A decade later we would rise to Acting President of the university, apparently only failing to take the position permanently because he was not Baptist, the school’s official denomination. In 1921, however, he would be asked to become president Yale—the first non-Yale graduate to hold the position in centuries.

Yale, as it turns out, was another major university at which psychology experienced a significant shakeup. George Trumbull Ladd, it will be recalled, had been one of the earliest expositors of early “physiological psychology” there. Although a beloved teacher and an accomplished philosopher (in addition to being an experienced international ambassador for American-style education), Ladd had never been an experimenter himself. So, in 1892, Yale hired a recent graduate of Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory, Edward Wheeler Scripture, to update the university’s psychological facilities and course offerings.¹⁷⁶ Scripture was industrious and productive, but also brash and often difficult to get along with. Although professionally respected, it is fair to say that he was not well liked. His Yale Studies journal had been the source of James’ complaint about psychology having only “College tin trumpets” instead of a truly national journal.¹⁷⁷ His book Thinking, Feeling, Doing had been the object of one of Münsterberg’s nastiest early reviews.¹⁷⁸ He had come into conflict with Titchener over an accusation of plagiarism against him.

As the century turned, Scripture’s research became increasingly focused on language and speech disorders.¹⁷⁹ The Yale administration, now led by its first non-clerical president, Arthur Twining Hadely, still continued the resistance to innovation that had prompted its very founding in the early 1700s.¹⁸⁰ Hadley was unimpressed by Scripture’s modern tendency toward original research and was irritated by him personally. He dismissed Scripture outright in 1903.¹⁸¹ Another man might have been destroyed, but Scripture barely slowed down. He moved to Munich where he earned a medical degree in 1906. He continued his research on speech, now with a new and impressive neurological aspect. In 1915, he took a position at Columbia University for a time. In 1919, he founded a speech clinic—a quite novel venture at the time—in London. Finally, in 1929, he took up a professorship in Vienna.

Back at Yale, however, the purge was not over. Having thrown out Scripture, the administration turned its eye on Ladd, forcing him to retire in 1905. The young Charles Hubbard Judd, then just 32, was left behind to hold the fort but, as we saw previously, he would escape to Chicago in 1909. Yale would not be a significant factor on the American psychological scene until Hadley was succeeded in the presidency by James Rowland Angell more than a decade and a half later.¹⁸²

In 1903, Cattell conducted a survey of American psychologists, asking them who the most important members of the discipline were. He tried to ensure absolute honesty by promising not to publish the results until “ten or twenty years hence.”¹⁸³ True to his word (and quite a bit more), the results were presented in the 1933 volume of his American Men of Science.¹⁸⁴ Topping his list, perhaps not surprisingly, was William James. Cattell himself ranked second. Münsterberg was third. Hall, no doubt much to what would have been his consternation, was relegated to fourth. In fifth place, though, was a figure who has not gained so prominent a place in the standard histories of the discipline: James Mark Baldwin.

Baldwin, it may be remembered, had earned his PhD at Princeton, taught for a short time at Lake Forest, then moved to Toronto for four years, where he founded a laboratory. In 1893 he had returned to Princeton as a professor, where he founded a second laboratory and wrote most of his important work on evolutionary and developmental theory.¹⁸⁵ In addition, he (co-)founded and (co-)edited Psychological Review, Psychological Monographs, and Psychological Index. After buying Cattell’s half of the Review,¹⁸⁶ he split the journal into two parts, creating Psychological Bulletin. As well, he edited (and wrote much of) the landmark Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology.¹⁸⁷ By any measure, he was a major player in the field.

In 1903, however, he became entangled in a dispute with an intransigent and high-handed university president who just happened to be named Woodrow Wilson. More than a little intransigent himself, Baldwin could no longer tolerate what he viewed as Wilson’s arrogance and his haughty dismissal of the significance of science.¹⁸⁸ Although history usually thinks of Wilson, because of his later American presidency, as an architect of the modern age of international relations, to Baldwin, Wilson at Princeton was a fusty old relic of a bygone era in American colleges. Not prepared to refight a battle that had already been fought and won elsewhere, Baldwin sought out a position at a prestigious school that had once been the very beacon of the new American university and of the new psychology: Johns Hopkins. Hopkins offered him what every professor desires: less teaching, more pay, and less paternalistic interference in his academic affairs. He jumped at the opportunity and moved to Baltimore. He hired George Stratton of Berkeley to be his laboratory director. He surrounded himself with several other promising assistants and instructors as well. Everything seemed aligned for Baldwin to go from being one highly significant figure of his time to becoming one of the truly exceptional figures in the history of the field.

Then, one day in June of 1908, when his wife and children were probably out of town, Baldwin was approached on the street near his home by a young African American woman, likely a teenager (or, at least, that was his account of the event). We do not know what was said, but she persuaded him to follow her to a nearby “social house”—a combined bar, gambling parlor, jazz club, and brothel. Baldwin entered, sat down, and may have just had time to order a drink. Then, without warning, the police burst in and arrested everyone. Baldwin had been lured into a police trap.¹⁸⁹ He was hauled off to the local stationhouse for questioning. He lied about his name. He denied knowing that prostitution was the main business of the place.¹⁹⁰ Several hours passed before the police figured out who he really was. When they did, to what must have been Baldwin’s great relief, they decided to release him without charge. He had dodged a bullet, one that could easily have ended his career, perhaps even his marriage. Or so it seemed.

The story had not yet played out completely. In March of the following year, 1909, the mayor of Baltimore nominated Baldwin for a position on the municipal school board. Only then was the mayor made aware of the arrest more than nine months before. Baldwin was called to the mayor’s office, questioned about the event, and asked to decline the position he had just been offered. He did, but it was already too late. The story appeared in the newspapers, which put Baldwin on a collision course with the Johns Hopkins administration, always nervous about questions of morality because of its non-denominational status.¹⁹¹

The ultimate conclusion was practically foregone. Baldwin was forced to resign his professorship. Probably because his Laboratory Director, Stratton was returning to Berkeley, Baldwin decided to hand not only his departmental chairmanship, but also the editorial control of his journals, over to a young professor he had, just months before, hired out of the University of Chicago: John B. Watson.¹⁹² Watson would go on to use the journals, especially Psychological Review, to great effect in spawning his behaviorist “revolution” during the following decade. By contrast, Baldwin’s professional downfall was catastrophic.¹⁹³ After the scandal became public, he was unable to find academic work anywhere in the US. He consulted on the expansion of the National University of Mexico for a short time, but soon moved himself and his family to Paris, where he would reside for the remaining 24 years of his life. There, he was able to acquire a minor appointment at the École des hautes etudes sociales, but he was never again a university professor. He became close friends with the foremost French psychiatrist of the day, Pierre Janet. Janet would later mentor the young Jean Piaget, and it has long been speculated that the striking similarities between Baldwin’s and Piaget’s approaches to child development may have been mediated by Janet’s long discussions with both. As a result of the scandal and the sudden extinction of his career when he was just 48 years of age, Baldwin was virtually written out of the standard histories of the topic.

Finally, we turn to William James. As the decade of the 1900s drew to a close, James was increasingly ill. An injury to his heart, dating back to a particularly arduous mountain climb in 1898, began to take a serious toll on his health.¹⁹⁴ He was invited to Stanford by the school’s owner, Jane Lathrop Stanford. She was much more interested in his psychical research than in pragmatism or radical empiricism, but it would give him an opportunity to spread his messages to a new region of the country. Mrs. Stanford died unexpectedly in February of 1905, before James had arrived, but he decided to go anyway, teaching there in the winter of 1906. Early on the morning of April 18th, he was awoken when his “bed beg[a]n to waggle.” He sat up, kneeling in his bed, but, as he later reported:

What James had experienced was the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, which damaged portions of the nearby Stanford campus.

The rest of the semester was canceled, and James left for home soon thereafter. He later confessed to Harvard President Eliot, though, that he now found mere lecturing so exhausting that, if his time on the west coast had not been cut short by the disaster, he didn’t think he would have made it through to the end of term. He returned to teaching at Harvard for the fall, but soon realized that he was rapidly becoming physically incapacitated. He hastily arranged for his retirement, to begin in late January of 1907.

Despite his ill health, James was able to write and deliver a series of eight lectures in December at Lowell Institute in Boston. The topic was pragmatism, the theory of truth that he had first publicly adopted in 1898, and that he had popularized in Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902. The published edition of these lectures—Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking—would immediately become one of James’ most important and enduring contributions to philosophy.¹⁹⁶ The book provoked such vociferous debate even in its own time that James was impelled to write a second book on the topic, The Meaning of Truth.¹⁹⁷ As though retirement itself had spurred him on to new creative heights despite his growing illness, in 1908 James traveled to Manchester to deliver a series of lectures titled A Pluralistic Universe which were also published the following year.¹⁹⁸

By the time James met Freud in September of 1909, he was unable to endure even the relatively mild rigors of the full conference. His chest pains and shortness of breath had become nearly constant companions. His energies were severely curtailed. Nevertheless, James’ legendary openness to new experience was as evident as ever in his search for a cure, or at least some relief. He consulted orthodox physicians and he went to homeopaths. He tried bed rest and he tried exercise regimens. He took the baths at exotic spas and he tolerated injections of arcane “animal extracts.” He ingested vile purgatives and he sought out Christian Science faith healers. Early in 1910, he rushed, once last time, to Europe where he endured some exotic new electrical therapy. Nothing helped. Finally, he submitted to the astonishing new technology of x-ray—a photograph of the inside of his body. The plate showed that he was suffering from an enlarged aorta. There was little more that could be done.¹⁹⁹

With a definite cause finally determined, James visited a few friends and colleagues around Paris—James Mark Baldwin and philosopher Henri Bergson, among them. He visited with his brother Henry, living in London. Then, in August, he returned home, not to Harvard, but to his beloved country home in Chocorua, New Hampshire. He lasted only a week longer, passing away on August 26 at the age of just 68. An era in American psychology seemed to pass away with him.

Notes

1 For an extensive account of McKinley’s assassination, see Scott Miller, The President and the Assassin (New York, NY: Random House, 2011).

2 According to Richard L. McElroy, Czolgosz was so persistent in his efforts to see Goldman that she had become apprehensive of him (William McKinley and Our America: A Pictorial History (Canton, Ohio: Stark County Historical Society, 1996)).

3 The commander of the fleet, George Dewey, was not related to John Dewey. He was also a Vermonter, but from Montpelier rather than Burlington.

4 Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 4 vols. (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1889–1896).

5 Although Roosevelt attained the governorship, he won it by less that two percentage points over his Democratic rival, whereas the Republican nominee two years before him had won by twelve points.

6 The vice president of McKinley’s first term, Garret Hobart, had died of a heart attack in November of 1899, a full year before the election of 1900, and had not been replaced.

7 In the election of 1900, McKinley won several western states that he had lost to Bryan in 1896. These included South Dakota, where Roosevelt had ranched in the 1880s. It is hard to tell whether Roosevelt’s presence on the ticket swung these states into McKinley’s column, or whether McKinley’s status as the presidential incumbent in 1900 drew voters to him who had opposed him in 1896, when he was merely a former governor of Ohio.

8 The claim of divine right was often explicit: George Baer, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, declared in the midst of the dispute that the “rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country” (cited in Henry William Brands, T.R. The Last Romantic (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997), 457).

9 A later revision of this very law would enable the US government to win the legendary 1917 judgment againt Clark Stanley for transporting his infamous Snake Oil across state lines.

10 Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, 2 vols. (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 1899). Royce (1855–1916) was born to English immigrants to California in the wake of the gold rush. His undergraduate degree was from the state university there, and then, after some study in Germany, he traveled to the newly-opened Johns Hopkins University, where he earned one of that school’s first PhDs in philosophy, in 1878. He returned to a lectureship at Berkeley but was soon called to Harvard to replace James during the latter’s 1882 sabbatical. Although Royce’s philosophical orientation—Objective Idealism—was more conventional than James’, his innovative integration of Idealism with fallibilism made him more interesting to James than most Idealists, and Royce was made permanent at Harvard in 1884. He came to be regarded as the leading spokesman for Idealism in North America. He served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1901, and of the American Philosophical Association in 1903–1904.

11 This was also discussed briefly back in Chapter 3, n. 83. The passage appears on p. 160 of the original edition of William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, NY: Longmans, Green, 1902).

12 This was not the first time James had used the term “pragmatism” in print. In a lecture given at the University of California in August 1898, James reported that Peirce had coined it back in the early 1870s (“Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” University of California] Chronicle 1 (1898): 287–310). Strangely, though, Peirce does not seem to have used the term in his own published works during the intervening quarter-century. So James’ Berkeley lecture, published in September 1898, may well have been the first time “pragmatism” appeared in print.

13 Returning, it is worth noting, to an important theme in his Principles of Psychology. All passages quoted in this paragraph are from James, Varieties, 444.

14 Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (1878): 286–302.

15 James, Varieties, 448.

16 Ibid., 453.

17 Ibid., 455–56.

18 Mary Baker Glover [Eddy], Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston, MA: Christian Scientist Publishing, 1875).

19 Rodney Stark, “The Rise and Fall of Christian Science,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 13 (1998): 190–91.

20 Amzi Clarence Dixon and Reuben Archer Torrey, eds., The Fundamentals: A Testimony to Truth, 12 vols. (Chicago, IL: Testimony Publishing, 1910–1915).

21 The Social Gospel was a liberal wing of Christianity that focused on social reform, such as alleviating poverty, alcoholism, crime, and supporting labor fairness, education, and peace. Crapsey’s unorthodox views on Jesus’ humanity would lead, in 1906, to his conviction for heresy, for which he was defrocked.

22 Fechner would die the very year that Worcester arrived in Leipzig, 1887.

23 Elwood Worcester, Life’s Adventure: The Story of a Varied Career (New York, NY: Scribner’s, 1932), 90–91.

24 Concerning the last of these, upon reading William James’ Pragmatism years later, Worcester wrote to the Harvard professor his surprise that James had not credited Fechner with first making the pragmatist argument for faith. At first James was doubtful but, after rereading Three Motives, came to agree with Worcester’s understanding of the relation between the two (ibid., 92–93).

25 Worcester wrote that “My first thought was to major with Wundt in psychology,” but he did not have the full year to devote to laboratory work that Wundt demanded, so he opted for the philosophical thesis with Heinze, which took only half the time. Worcester wrote that he “attended every [lecture] course he [Wundt] gave, as well as his seminar” but there is no mention of any work in the famed laboratory (ibid., 89). Ludy Benjamin could find evidence that Worcester took only two courses with Wundt, however, and that Wundt served on his thesis committee (“Wundt’s American Doctoral Students,” American Psychologist 47 (1992): 123–31).

26 For more information on these events, see Eugene Taylor, William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999); “Psychotherapeutics and the Problematic Origins of Clinical Psychology in America,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 1029–33; Eric Caplan, Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); Sanford Gifford, The Emmanuel Movement: The Origins of Group Treatment and the Assault on Lay Psychotherapy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

27 See James’ prior work on the nature and significance of unusual conscious states in Eugene Taylor, ed., William James on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell Lectures Reconstructed (New York, NY: Scribner’s, 1983).

28 James Jackson Putnam (1846–1918) was a native Bostonian who studied in Europe with luminaries such as Theodor Meynert and John Hughlings Jackson. He founded the Department of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and served as president of the American Neurological Association in 1888. Just prior to the events described here, he had published Studies in Neurological Diagnosis (Boston, MA: G. H. Ellis, 1902). Morton Prince (1854–1929) was a wealthy Bostonian who, after a Harvard medical degree, had studied with Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris. He specialized in neurology and became an expert in dissociative personality (Morton Prince, Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology (New York, NY: Longmans, Green, 1906)). Prince was also the founding editor of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, launched in 1906. Boris Sidis (1867–1923) had been jailed for as long as two years simply for being Jewish under the religious repression of Czarist Russia in the 1880s (the “May Laws”). He immigrated to America from Ukraine in 1887, where he earned a PhD and a MD, both at Harvard. He became a leading psychopathologist and an intriguing, if rather idiosyncratic, theoretical psychologist. See, e.g., Boris Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research Into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society (New York, NY: D. Appleton, 1898); Psychopathological Researches: Studies in Mental Dissociation (London, UK: Stechert, 1902); Boris Sidis and Simon P. Goodhart, Multiple Personality: An Experimental Investigation Into Human Individuality (New York, NY: D. Appleton, 1904).

29 Eugene Taylor found that this group was already treating “hundreds of patients … each year in the outpatient clinics of local hospitals with psychotherapeutic methods of suggestion, persuasion, light hypnosis, dream analysis, and with regimes such as social milieu therapy” (Shadow Culture, 176).

30 Worcester, Life’s Adventure, 285.

31 Ibid., 287.

32 There was a family of trance-inducing methods that have a long history, often outside of, or even in opposition to, the medical mainstream. In the Western tradition, they date back to at least Anton Mesmer and almost certainly well before. The “New Thought” of Phineas Quimby (1802–1866) was a peculiarly American incarnation of this tradition, focusing on the curing of illness by “mind power.” It fell to a student of Quimby’s, Warren Felt Evans, to commit the New Thought teachings to print. Evans also integrated them with ideas of Emmanuel Swedenborg, which may have been part of the reason that William James was so fascinated by them. Mary Baker Eddy had been a patient and student of Quimby’s in the 1860s, and she later combined his techniques with her own unorthodox religious beliefs to form Christian Science.

33 Before the Emmanuel Movement, “psychotherapy” was not commonly used in English. Daniel Hack Tuke had coined the term “psychotherapeutics” in 1872, specifically linking it to the practice of Mesmerism. But the term did not really come into its own until the prominent Nancy (France) medical professor, Hippolyte Bernheim, mentioned it in passing in an 1886 book, and then put in into the title of his 1891 Hypnotisme, suggestion, psychothérapie, études nouvelles (see Sonu Shamdasani, “ ‘Psychotherapy’: The Invention of a Word,” History of the Human Sciences 18 (2005): 1–22 for a more detailed history). It seems plausible that James adopted the term from Bernheim’s work, bringing it with him to the Emmanuel Movement. He had also attended an earlier conference in Paris where two former students of Bernheim used the term in their presentation (Albert Willem van Renterghem and Frederik Van Eeden, “Clinique de Psycho-Thérapie Suggestive Fondée à Amsterdam Le 15 Août 1887,” in Prémier Congrès International de L’hypnotisme Expérimental et Thérapeutique, ed. Edgar Bérillon (Paris, France: Octave Doin, 1889), 57–78).

34 Richard C. Cabot, “The American Type of Psychotherapy,” Psychotherapy: A Course Reading in Sound Psychology, Sound Medicine, and Sound Religion 1 (1908), cited in Caplan, Mind Games, 4.

35 Richard C. Cabot, “New Phases in the Relation of the Church to Health,” Outlook, February 29, 1908, cited in Caplan, Mind Games, 127–28.

36 Elwood Worcester, Samuel McComb, and Isador H. Coriat, Religion and Medicine: The Moral Control of Nervous Disorders (New York, NY: Moffat, Yard, 1908).

37 Clarence B. Farrer, “Psychotherapy and the Church,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 36 (1909): 11–24.

38 Worcester, Life’s Adventure, 288.

39 Lightner Witmer, “Review and Criticism: Mental Healing and the Emmanuel Movement,” The Psychological Clinic 2 (1909–1910): 212–24, 239–50, 282–300.

40 Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotherapy (New York, NY: Moffat, Yard, 1909), 341. It is uncertain what role, if any, Münsterberg’s mindfulness of the involvement of his Harvard colleague, William James, may have played in his careful parsing of the situation.

41 Ibid., 331.

42 Many people have written about the psychological component of this Clark Conference of 1909. In this section I have drawn especially on Rand B. Evans and William A. Koelsch, “Psychoanalysis Arrives in America: The 1909 Psychology Conference at Clark University,” American Psychologist 40 (1985): 942–48; Saul Rosenzweig, Freud, Jung, and Hall the King-Maker (St. Louis, MO: Rana House, 1992); and Taylor, Shadow Culture.

43 Indeed, Meyer and Eugen Bleuler (Jung’s supervisor, and the man who coined the terms “schizophrenia” and “autism”) had both studied there under August Forel. See Taylor, Shadow Culture, 212 for a discussion of the network of connections.

44 Taylor, Shadow Culture, 211. Of course, it was not inconsequential that Freud’s lectures were delivered in German, making them difficult for most journalists even to understand, much less report on extensively, while Jennings’ were given in English.

45 William James, “Report on Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson Control,” Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 23 (1909): 470–589. See Rosenzweig, Freud, Jung, and Hall the King-Maker, 80 ff. for a detailed description of the scene.

46 Amy E. Tanner, Studies in Spiritism (New York, NY: Appleton, 1910). Tanner had earned a PhD in psychology at Chicago in 1898. Then she had taken a teaching position at Wilson College in Chambersburg, PA before moving to Clark in 1907 as an Honorary University Fellow. Although she became Director of Experimental Pedagogy at Clark’s Child Institute in 1909, she was unable to obtain a permanent position and left in 1918 (Jacy L. Young, “Amy Tanner,” ed. Alexandra Rutherford, Psychology’s Feminist Voices, 2010, www.feministvoices.com/amy-tanner/; see also Michael Pettit, “The New Woman as ‘Tied-Up Dog’: Amy E. Tanner’s Situated Knowledges,” History of Psychology 11 (2008): 145–63).

47 Anna O. was a pseudonym for Bertha Pappenheim, who went on to become an important feminist activist in Austria; she founded the League of Jewish Women (Jüdischer Frauenbund). The full story of Anna O.’s treatment and recovery departed considerably from Freud’s publish account. See Henri F. Ellenberger, “The Story of ‘Anna O.’: A Critical Review With New Data,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 8 (1972): 267–79.

48 These letters are reproduced in Ruth Leys and Rand B. Evans, eds., Defining American Psychology: The Correspondence Between Adolf Meyer and Edward Bradford Titchener (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

49 Titchener had long desired to move of moving out of the backwoods of New York state to a major city (if he could not return to his beloved Oxford). The negotiations ultimately came to nothing, however, because Cornell would not release Titchener until he completed his multiyear contract. Hall and Sanford could not wait. See Evans and Koelsch, “Psychoanalysis Arrives in America.”

50 See Christopher D. Green and Ingo Feinerer, “The Evolution of the American Journal of Psychology, 1904–1918: A Network Investigation,” American Journal of Psychology 129 (2016): 185–96.

51 Nathan G. Hale, ed., James Jackson Putnam and Psychoanalysis: Letters Between Putnam and Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, William James, Sandor Ferenczi, and Morton Prince, 1877–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

52 Taylor, Shadow Culture, 222–23.

53 Ibid., esp. pp. 227–31.

54 Andrew Scull, “Contending Professions: Sciences of the Brain and Mind in the United States, 1850–2013,” Science in Context 28 (2015): 131–61.

55 David B. Baker and Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., “The Affirmation of the Scientist-Practitioner: A Look Back at Boulder,” American Psychologist 55, no. 2 (2000): 241–47. I specify PhDs here because, since the 1970s, there has been a second form of clinical psychology doctorate, the PsyD, which lays a greater emphasis on “practitioner” and far less on “scientist” than the PhD.

56 The “Dutch” of Pennsylvania were actually Deutsch or German, rather than originating in the Netherlands.

57 Most of the background here derives from Paul McReynolds, Lightner Witmer: His Life and Times (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1997). See also Robert A. Brotemarkle, ed., Clinical Psychology: Essays in Honor of Lightner Witmer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931); Lightner Witmer, “Clinical Psychology,” The Psychological Clinic 1 (1907): 1–9.

58 The full story is somewhat complicated. See McReynolds, Witmer, 21 for details.

59 Interestingly, Witmer’s financial aid came from an enormous fund ($60,000) that had been bequeathed to Penn by the prominent and wealthy chemist and mineralogist, Henry Seybert for the purposes of studying the claims of spiritualism (McReynolds, Witmer, 45–46, 58).

60 A mathematical curiosity know at least as far back as Euclid’s time, the Golden Section is a proportion in which a line is unequally divided such that the ratio of the smaller part to the larger part is equal to the ratio of the larger part to the whole line. It is an irrational number equal to approximately 1.618. During the Renaissance, it was claimed that the Golden Section had profound aesthetic properties when incorporated into artworks. In mid-19th-century Germany, these claims were revived and greatly elaborated, which led Fechner to take them up experimentally. See, e.g., Christopher D. Green, “All That Glitters: A Review of Psychological Research on the Aesthetics of the Golden Section.,” Perception 24 (1995): 937–68.

61 Gustav Theodor Fechner, Elemente Der Psychophysik (Leipzig, Germany: Druck und Verlag Von Breitkopf and Härtel, 1860); Gustav Theodor Fechner, Vorschule Der Aestheiik (Leipzig, Germany: Druck und Verlag Von Breitkopf and Härtel, 1876).

62 Cited in McReynolds, Witmer, 42.

63 His doctorate was not formally conferred until 1893.

64 McReynolds, Witmer; Lightner Witmer, “A Case of Chornic Bad Spelling—Amnesia Visualis Verbalis due to Arrest of Post-Natal Development,” The Psychological Clinic 1 (1907): 53–68.

65 Lightner Witmer, “The Teaching of Psychology to Teachers,” The Citizen 2 (1896): 158–62; Lightner Witmer, “The Common Interests of Child Psychology and Pediatrics,” Pediatrics 2 (1896): 390–95; Lightner Witmer, “Practical Work in Psychology,” Pediatrics 2 (1896): 462–71.

66 Lightner Witmer, “The Organization of Practical Work in Psychology [Abstract],” Psychological Review 4 (1897): 116–17.

67 Hugo Münsterberg, “The Danger from Experimental Psychology,” Atlantic Monthly 81 (February 1898): 159–66.

68 The APA reluctantly created a Clinical Section in 1919 in order to quell competition from J. E. Wallace Wallin and Leta Hollingworth’s fledgling American Association of Clinical Psychologists. The Clinical Section failed after less than a decade (See Donald K. Routh, “Clinical Psychology Training: A History of Ideas and Practices Prior to 1946,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 236–41; Franz Samelson, “The APA Between the WorldWars: 1918–1941,” in 100 Years: The American Psychological Association. A Historical Perspective, ed. Rand B. Evans, Virginia Staudt Sexton, and Thomas C. Cadwallader (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1992), 119–47).

69 Titchener had resigned his membership in 1895 in protest over the APA inaction on what he believed to be a case of plagiarism by Yale’s Edward Wheeler Scripture. See C. James Goodwin, “On the Origins of Titchener’s Experimentalists,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 21 (1985): 383–89.

70 Samuel W. Fernberger, “The History of the Psychological Clinic,” in Clinical Psychology: Essays in Honor of Lightner Witmer, ed. Robert A. Brotemarkle (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), 10–36.

71 “Hyslop’s Spirit Talk Is Viewed Skeptically,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 16, 1900, 5.

72 Letter from Witmer to Titchener, January 25, 1904, cited in McReynolds, Witmer, 109–10.

73 Laurel Furumoto, “Shared Knowledge: The Experimentalists, 1904–1929,” in The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology, ed. Jill G. Morawski (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 94–113.

74 Edwin G. Boring, “Titchener’s Experimentalists,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 3 (1967): 315–25; see also Alexandra Rutherford, Kelli Vaughn-Johnson, and Elissa Rodkey, “Does Psychology Have a Gender?,” The Psychologist 28 (2015): 508–11.

75 At least in English. There had been a minor French journal titled, Revue de Psychologie Clinique et Thérapeutique from 1897 to 1901.

76 Witmer, “Clinical Psychology,” 1.

77 Actually, Witmer had insulted the highly sensitive Münsterberg a few years before by criticizing the Harvard department for being purely scientific, admitting no practical aspect to their psychology. Indeed, Münsterberg himself had once insisted on just this state, but, by the early 1900s, he had reversed himself completely and was beginning to work in a number of different applied areas, though few people knew it at the time. By 1909, Witmer knew full well of Munsterberg’s efforts, and he sharply disparaged the value of the German man’s applied work. Münsterberg was, of course, predictably furious over the slight, and he called on the APA to sanction Witmer for his harsh words. The APA demurred, but Witmer did not attend that year’s association meeting, which just happened to be hosted at Harvard by Münsterberg.

78 Witmer, “Emmanuel Movement.”

79 As noted in chapter 4 (n. 104), Herbert Spencer and some in the Herbartian school—proposed similar ideas earlier, but Haeckel drew the attention with his elegant illustrations. Ernst Haeckel, Anthropogenie Oder Entwickelungsgeschichte Des Menschen [Anthpogeny, or the Developmental History of Man] (Leipzig, Germany: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1874).

80 On the issue specifically of Hall’s recapitulationism, see Sheldon H. White, “Developmental Psychology in a World of Designed Institutions,” ed. Willem Koops and Michael Zuckerman, vol. Beyond the century of the child: Cultural history and developmental psychology (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Charles E. Strickland and Charles Burgess, “G. Stanley Hall: Prophet of Naturalism,” in Health, Growth, and Heredity: G. Stanley Hall on Natural Education, ed. Charles E. Strickland and Charles Burgess (New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 1965); Robert E. Grinder, “The Concept of Adolescence in the Genetic Psychology of G. Stanley Hall,” Child Development 40 (1969): 355–69; Robert E. Grinder, A History of Genetic Psychology (New York, NY: Wiley, 1967); Christopher D. Green, “Hall’s Developmental Theory and Haeckel’s Recapitulationism,” European Journal of Developmental Psychology 12 (2015): 656–65.

81 G. Stanley Hall, “Civilization and Savagery,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society n.s. 17 (1903): 11.

82 G. Stanley Hall, “The Contents of Children’s Minds,” Princeton Review 11 (1883): 249–72; G. Stanley Hall, “New Psychology as a Basis of Education,” Forum 17 (1894): 710–20.

83 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, 2 vols. (New York, NY: Appleton, 1904).

84 Although only 19% of American 15–18 year olds were in high school in 1910, by 1940 the rate would grow dramatically to 73%; see Claudia Goldin, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

85 Hall, Adolescence, vol. 1, 1.

86 Ibid., vol. 1, 71.

87 G. Stanley Hall, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York, NY: Appleton, 1923), plate opposite p. 216.

88 For more on Thorndike’s life and career, see especially G. Joncich, The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968) and the tribute of his son, Robert L. Thorndike, “Edward L. Thorndike: A Professional and Personal Appreciation,” in Portraits of Pioneers of Psychology, ed. Gregory A Kimble, Michael Wertheimer, and Charlotte L. White, vol. 1 (Washington, DC and Hillsdale, NJ: American Psychological Association and Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 1991), 138–51.

89 Edward L. Thorndike, “The Nature, Purposes and General Methods of Measurements of Educational Products,” ed. G. M. Whipple, The Measurement of Educational Products. National Society for the Study of Education Yearbook 17, no. Part 2 (1918): 16–24.

90 Edward L. Thorndike, “Measurements of Twins,” Columbia University Contributions to Philosophy and Psychology 13 (1905): 1–64.

91 Probably because the identical twins in his twins sample raised the average similarity in that group, even though the fraternal twins should have been no more similar to each other than non-twin siblings.

92 After work in World War I personnel selection, he developed the IER Intelligence Examination for High School Graduates (a forerunner of the Scholastic Achievement Test, or SAT) and the Intelligence Scale CAVD, which was long used as an entrance screening test at a number of elite universities, including his own Columbia.

93 For more complete descriptions of these events and Münsterberg’s role in them, see Matthew Hale, Jr., Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1980), 93–97; Margaret Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg, His Life and Work (New York, NY: D. Appleton, 1922), 95–117.

94 Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., “Meet Me at the Fair: A Centennial Retrospective of Psychology at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair,” APS Observer 17 (2004), www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/uncategorized/meet-me-at-the-fair.html.

95 Hugo Münsterberg, “The St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences,” Atlantic Monthly 91 (1903): 671–84.

96 John Dewey, “The St. Louis Congress of the Arts and Sciences,” Science n.s. 18 (August 28, 1903): 275–78.

97 James Rowland Angell, “Psychology at the St. Louis Congress,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method 2 (1905): 533. It is worth noting that both of these critics—Dewey and Angell—were colleagues of Small at the University of Chicago.

98 Ibid., 534.

99 Ibid., 535.

100 Ibid.

101 James McKeen Cattell, “The Conceptions and Methods of Psychology,” Popular Science Monthly 66 (1904): 176.

102 Ibid.

103 Ibid., 179.

104 Ibid., 179–80.

105 Ibid., 185.

106 Even if Cattell really did have a constitutional inability to introspect, as has been suggested by Michael Sokal in “Scientific Biography, Cognitive Deficits, and Laboratory Practice: James McKeen Cattell and Early American Experimental Psychology, 1880–1904,” Isis 101 (2010): 531–54.

107 The locus classicus for women in early psychology is Elizabeth Scarborough and Laurel Furumoto, Untold Lives: The First Generation of American Women Psychologists (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1987). Also see Katherine Milar, “The First Generation of Women Psychologists and the Psychology of Women,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 616–19 and Elizabeth Johnston and Ann Johnson, “Searching for the Second Generation of American Women Psychologists,” History of Psychology 11 (2008): 40–72. The advantages of the internet, however, have enabled Alexandra Rutherford to supersede these resources with her stupendous website, “Psychology’s Feminist Voices,” 2008, www.feministvoices.com.

108 Margaret Floy Washburn, Alice Julia Hamlin (Hinman), Eleanor A. M. Gamble, and Stella Emily Sharp. See Robert W. Proctor and Rand B. Evans, “E. B. Titchener, Women Psychologists, and the Experimentalists,” American Journal of Psychology 127 (2014): 501–26.

109 A classic discussion of this matter can be found in Stephanie Shields, “Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women,” American Psychologist 30 (1975): 739–54.

110 Joseph Jastrow, “A Study of Mental Statistics,” New Review 5 (1891): 559–68. To make the groups equal in size, Jastrow used the responses of all 25 women and those of the first 25 men to finish the task. What impact this arbitrary form of sampling had on the results is difficult to say.

111 Cordelia C. Nevers and Mary W. Calkins, “Dr. Jastrow on Community of Ideas of Men and Women,” Psychological Review 2 (1895): 363–67.

112 Joseph Jastrow, “Community of Ideas of Men and Women,” Psychological Review 3 (1896): 68–71; Calkins, Mary Whiton, “Community of Ideas of Men and Women,” Psychological Review 3 (1896): 426–30.

113 Helen Bradford Thompson, The Mental Traits of Sex: An Experimental Investigation of the Normal Mind in Men and Women (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1903), 182.

114 Perhaps ironically, Hall used the dissertation of Millicent Shinn (University of California, 1895) to buttress his claim that educated women tended not to marry. Conversely, though, Shinn had shown that the very large discrepancy that some cited was actually caused by the fact that most educated women of that time were still rather young and, thus, were not yet married. Among educated women over the age of 50, more than 50% had married. This was about 2/3 the rate of women who had not gone to college, but hardly the reproductive disaster that some men foresaw.

115 Edward L. Thorndike, Educational Psychology, vol. III: Mental work and fatigue and individual differences and their causes (New York, NY: Teachers College, Columbia University Press, 1914).

116 Kate Gordon, “Wherein Should the Education of a Woman Differ From that of a Man?,” School Review 13 (1905): 789–94.

117 Martin’s education is often misdescribed. She went to Göttingen to study under G. E. Müller. She was there for four years (1894–1898) and, by all accounts, did excellent psychophysical research, but she left before completing her PhD It is not the case, as is often reported, that Göttingen refused her a degree that she had earned. The story seems to have been confused with a related one—that Martin applied to Bonn in 1895 and was refused entry because she was a woman, but she was later granted an honorary doctorate by Bonn in 1913.

118 For a complete account of her life, see, Harry L. Hollingworth, Leta Stettler Hollingworth, a Biography (Bolton, MA: Anker, 1990) (originally published in 1943).

119 Leta Stetter Hollingworth, “Functional Periodicity: An Experimental Study of the Mental and Motor Abilities of Women During Menstruation” (Teacher’s College, Columbia University, 1914).

120 Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., “Hugo Münsterberg’s Attack on the Application of Scientific Psychology,” Journal of Applied Psychology 91 (2006): 414–25, doi:10.1037/0021–9010.91.2.414.

121 William Stern, Uber Psychologie Der Individuellen Differenzen (Leipzig, Germany: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1900).

122 William Stern, “Angewandte Psychologie,” Beiträge Zur Psychologie Aussage 1 (1904 1903): 11–12, 19–23.

123 Although tensions between Münsterberg and James had been growing gradually since his arrival, it was a dispute over the ceremonies around the opening of Emerson Hall, of all things, that finally drove the two men into open conflict. Münsterberg, as Division Chairman, believed that he was the proper chief official for the occasion. James resented what he saw as Münsterberg’s continuous status-seeking and expressed his openly nationalistic view that a German should not play so prominent a role at an American institution. President Eliot was forced to intervene between the men, reminding James that it was he who had recommended they hire this particular German in the first place. See, e.g., Hale, Jr., Human Science, 102–3.

124 “Ivins Innocent, Is Belief of Two Note Alienists,” Chicago Tribune, June 13, 1906, 5, http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1906/06/13/page/5/article/stork-backs-8-hour-day. Also cited in Hale, Jr., Human Science, 111.

125 “Untrue Confessions” (Times Magazine, January 1907) was just the first of several popular articles that Münsterberg published on the topic. Other outlets included Reader’s Magazine, McClure’s, and Cosmopolitan. See M. Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg, His Life and Work, 368–69, for a complete list.

126 A particularly tart satire was penned by the famed jurist, John H. Wigmore, “Professor Munsterberg and the Psychology of Testimony: Being a Report of the Case of Cokestone v. Munsterberg,” Illinois Law Review 3 (1909): 399–445.

127 See chapter 4 on the Molly McGuires. McParland was born in Northern Ireland to the name McParlan. Hale renders it in the original form in Human Science and Social Order, 116, but once in America, the (in)famous Pinkerton used McParland.

128 This test, described above, was still mostly unknown to Americans at this time. Jung would not present his findings to an American audience until his first trip to the USA, at Clark University in 1909, four years after these events. Münsterberg, however, kept close track of developments in the German journals of the day. Interestingly, the German psychologist Max Wertheimer (who would soon to co-found the Gestalt school of psychology) independently developed as similar test at about the same time, but he never received the same recognition for it as Jung did.

129 Hale, Jr., Human Science, 117–18.

130 Hugo Münsterberg, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime (New York, NY: Doubleday Page, 1908). (Note, there is some confusion about the date because it was copyrighted in 1908, but not published until 1909.)

131 Marston also sometimes went by the pen name Charles Moulton.

132 For more on Marston’s life, see Geoffrey C. Bunn, “The Lie Detector, Wonder Woman and Liberty: The Life and Work of William Moulton Marston,” History of the Human Sciences 10 (1997): 91–119; Jill LePore, “The Last Amazon: Wonder Woman Returns,” The New Yorker, September 22, 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/last-amazon. Interestingly, it appears that Wonder Woman’s nemesis, Dr. Psycho, was modeled on none other than Münsterberg.

133 Edwin Balmer and William McHarg, The Achievements of Luther Trant (Boston, MA: Small Maynard, 1910). See also Melissa M. Littlefield, The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

134 Edwin Balmer, The Science of Advertising (New York, NY: Wallace Press, 1910).

135 Münsterberg, Psychotherapy.

136 Adolf Meyer, “[Review of] Psychotherapy, by H. Münsterberg.,” Science N.S. 30, no. 761 (1909): 150.

137 Hale, Jr., Human Science, 128. James Rowland Angell’s textbook, the most complete statement of functionalist thought, had just been published: Psychology: An Introductory Study of the Structure and Function of Human Consciousness (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 1904).

138 Münsterberg, Psychotherapy, 1.

139 Ibid., 70.

140 Ibid., 3.

141 Ibid., 125.

142 Ibid., 208–11.

143 Hugo Münsterberg, “Finding Life’s Work,” McClure’s 34 (1910): 398–403.

144 Hugo Münsterberg, Vocation and Learning (St. Louis, MO: People’s University, 1912); Hugo Münsterberg, Business Psychology (Chicago, IL: La Salle Extension University, 1915).

145 Hugo Münsterberg, “Prohibition and Social Psychology,” McClure’s 31 (1908): 438–44.

146 Hale, Jr., Human Science, 119–20.

147 Michael Pettit, The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). See also Andreas Sommer, “Psychical Research and the Origins of American Psychology: Hugo Münsterberg, William James and Eusapia Palladino,” History of the Human Sciences 25 (2012): 23–44.

148 His daughter, Margaret Münsterberg, claimed that the assistant was a man named Edgar Scott of Philadelphia (Hugo Münsterberg, His Life and Work, 181).

149 Hugo Münsterberg, “My Friends the Spiritualists: Some Theories and Conclusions Concerning Eusapia Palladino,” Metropolitan Magazine 31 (1910): 559–72.

150 William James to Oliver Lodge, Jan 22, 1910, Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds., The Correspondence of William James (Charlottesville, VA and London, UK: University of Virginia Press, 1992–2004), vol. 12, 418.

151 William James to Hereward Carrington, January 24, 1910, Ibid., vol. 12, 420.

152 William James to Théodore Flournoy, April 9, 1910, Ibid., vol. 12, 466.

153 See, e.g., Linda Schott, “Jane Addams and William James on Alternatives to War,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (1993): 241–54.

154 Francesca Bordogna lucidly lays out each of these possibilities in turn in William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Knowledge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 193–94.

155 William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” McClure’s 35 (August 1910): 463–68.

156 Ibid., 467.

157 William James, “A World of Pure Experience,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 1 (1904): 533–43, 561–70; William James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 1 (1904): 477–91. See also William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Ralph Barton Perry (New York, NY: Longmans, Green, 1912), in which his former student collected together many related essays in “an attempt to carry out a plan which William James is known to have formed several years before his death” (from the start of the Preface).

158 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London, UK: John Noon, 1739–1740), Book 1, part 4, sections 3–6.

159 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1781/1929), 113.

160 James, “A World of Pure Experience,” 536.

161 James’ two articles of 1904 and many responses to them were reprinted in Eugene I. Taylor and Robert H. Wozniak, eds., Pure Experience: The Response to William James (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1996). Charles Peirce was aligned with this group as well, but still very poorly known outside of a narrow circle (see Douglas Anderson, “Another Radical Empiricism: Peirce 1903,” in Conversations on Peirce: Reals and Ideals, ed. Douglas R. Anderson and Carl R. Hausman (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012)).

162 Interestingly, one of James’ principal students, Edwin B. Holt, would go on to develop a behaviorist philosophical psychology, though one expansive enough to include concepts such as plans, purposes, and goals. Although Holt is not well known today, he supervised the dissertation of Edward C. Tolman, who would become the leading advocate of a position called “purposive behaviorism” during the neobehaviorist era of approximately 1930 to 1960. See, e.g., David W. Carroll, Purpose and Cognition: Edward Tolman and the Transformation of American Psychology (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press); Eric P. Charles, A New Look at New Realism: The Psychology and Philosophy of E. B. Holt (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011).

163 For more information on the psychological and philosophical associations, see Christopher D. Green et al., “Bridge Over Troubled Waters? The Most ‘Central’ Members of Psychology and Philosophy Associations Ca. 1900,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 52 (2016): 279–99.

164 The “Western Branch” did not last long, though. It met intermittently until just 1908. A separate Midwestern Psychological Association formed in the 1920s. (See Samuel W. Fernberger, “The American Psychological Association: A Historical Summary, 1892–1930,” Psychological Bulletin 29 (1932): 1–89; Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., “The Midwestern Psychological Association: A History of the Organization and Its Antecedents, 1902–1978,” American Psychologist 43 (1979): 201–13; W. A. Russell, “The Midwestern Psychological Association,” in No Small Part: A History of Regional Organizations in American Psychology, ed. James L. Pate and Michael Wertheimer (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1993), 43–67.) A New York regional branch formed in 1900 as well. It eventually evolved into the Eastern Psychological Association, which still exists today, though it is no longer affiliated with the APA.

165 Fernberger, “American Psychological Association,” 60.

166 Cited in Harry Norman Gardiner, “The First Twenty-Five Years of the American Philosophical Association,” Philosophical Review 35 (1926): 148.

167 See James L. Pate, “The Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology,” in No Small Part: A History of Regional Organizations in American Psychology, ed. James L. Pate and Michael Wertheimer (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1993), 1–19; James Burt Miner, “The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology,” Psychological Bulletin 28 (1931): 1–13.

168 “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894, US Senator from 1895 until his death in 1918 (cited in Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 15).

169 Haywood J. Pearce, professor at Emory College and a founding member of SSPP, cited in Miner, “Twenty-Fifth Anniversary,” 3–4.

170 Buchner was at Alabama from 1903 to 1908. He would spend the rest of his career as Professor of Education at Johns Hopkins.

171 Although the editorial in which this comment appeared was anonymous “The American Psychological Association,” American Journal of Psychology 7 (1896): 448), Michael Sokal asserts that it was “almost surely written by Titchener” (“Origins and Early Years of the American Psychological Association, 1890–1906,” American Psychologist 47 (1992): 119).

172 Boring, “Titchener’s Experimentalists”; Goodwin, “On the Origins of Titchener’s Experimentalists.”

173 Marshall taught aesthetics at Columbia in 1894–1895 and at Princeton in 1915–1916, but his main vocation was as an architect, not a professor (Robert Kugelmann, “Introspective Psychology, Pure and Applied. Henry Rutgers Marshall on Pain and Pleasure,” History of Psychology 4 (2001): 34–58). Stratton, who had earned his PhD under Wundt, was mostly a vision researcher. A native of the San Francisco area, he spent the bulk of his career at the University of California, but also directed the Johns Hopkins laboratory under James Mark Baldwin between 1904 and 1909 (Edward Chace Tolman, “Biographical Memoir of George M. Stratton (1865–1957),” National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Biographical Memoirs, 1961, 290–306). Judd, also a Leipzig graduate, taught at Yale from 1902 to 1909, but was then hired to chair Chicago’s Department of Education in the wake of Dewey’s contentious departure, about which more immediately below (Adrian Brock, “Charles Hubbard Judd: A Wundtian Social Psychologist in the United States,” Psychologie und Geschichte (1992) 3, no. 3/4 (1992): 17–23).

174 The entire complicated and sorry episode is recounted in great detail by Michael Knoll, “John Dewey as Administrator: The Inglorious End of the Laboratory School in Chicago,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 47 (2015).

175 See ibid.

176 Published accounts of Scripture’s career are somewhat rare. I have relied here on several papers presented by Russell Kosits of Redeemer College (Ancaster, Ontario) at the conferences of Cheiron: The International Society for the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences in 2008 and 2009, and at the conventions of the American Psychological Association in 2011.

177 Letter from William James to Josiah Royce dated December 18, 1892. Skrupskelis and Berkeley, Correspondence of William James, vol. 7, 351.

178 Edward Wheeler Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing (New York, NY: Flood and Vincent, 1895).

179 Edward Wheeler Scripture, The Elements of Experimental Phonetics (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902); Edward Wheeler Scripture, “How the Voice Looks,” Century Magazine 64 (May 1902): 148–53.

180 David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford, reported that, in response to a public lecture Hadley gave in 1904 on the virtues of the 13th-century university, President Eliot of Harvard rose to pointedly opine that “the American University has nothing to learn from Medieval universities, nor yet from those still in the medieval period” (Days of a Man: Being Memories of a Naturalist, Teacher, and Minor Prophet of Democracy, vol. 2 (Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book, 1922), 2). And so the ancient Harvard–Yale rivalry carried on into the new century.

181 Indeed, Yale’s historic conservatism put it on the outskirts of the revolution taking place in American universities at the turn of the century with respect to the importance ascribed to the conduct of original research. Although Yale was a charter member of the prestigious Association of American Universities in 1900 (along with 13 other schools), one leading historian of the American university wrote that “by 1910, if a research-oriented observer had been asked to name the leading American universities, he probably would have listed Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins, in that order” (Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, 171).

182 It was Angell’s hiring of neobehaviorist Clark Hull in 1929 that really marked Yale’s return to the top ranks of American psychology.

183 James McKeen Cattell, “Statistics of American Psychologists,” American Journal of Psychology 14 (1903): 575.

184 James McKeen Cattell, American Men of Science (New York, NY: Science Press, 1933).

185 James Mark Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 1895); James Mark Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development: A Study in Social Psychology (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 1899); James Mark Baldwin, Development and Evolution (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 1902).

186 On Baldwin’s and Cattell’s chronic inability to get along, and the bizarre auction they ultimately had to decide which would take full control of the 9, see Michael M. Sokal, “Baldwin, Cattell and the Psychological Review: A Collaboration and Its Discontents,” History of the Human Sciences 10, no. 1 (1997): 57–89.

187 James Mark Baldwin, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 3 vols. (New York, NY and London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1901).

188 James Mark Baldwin, Between Two Wars, 1861–1921 (Boston, MA: Stratford, 1926).

189 The details of this story, long a mystery, come from the extraordinary research of Robert H. Wozniak and Jorge A. Santiago-Blay, “Trouble at Tyson Alley: James Mark Baldwin’s Arrest in a Baltimore Bordello,” History of Psychology 16 (2013): 227–48.

190 Baldwin’s denials seem hardly credible to us today. It is possible, however, that he was there for the other recreations the establishment afforded. In any case, it appears that Baldwin was a victim of rival factions of police who were trying to show each other to be lax in their duties, and possibly corrupt (Ibid.).

191 It may be recalled from the scandal that had forced Charles Sanders Peirce out of the same school 25 years earlier, that Hopkins a non-denominational school continually having to demonstrate its moral rectitude to Baltimore’s various religious communities.

192 To be precise, Baldwin sold the journals to his former student and then Princeton professor, Howard C. Warren. Warren and Watson split the editorships between them. The lurking irony in Watson’s takeover of Baldwin’s professional positions here is that Watson had been refusing overtures from Baldwin for years, and had only finally agreed to the move when it became apparent that Chicago was about to fire him over an extra-marital affair that he had indulged in there (Kerry W. Buckley, Mechanical Man: John B. Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism (New York, NY: Guilford, 1989)).

193 Robert H. Wozniak, “James Mark Baldwin, Professional Disaster, and the European Connection,” Rassegna Di Psicologia 26 (2009): 111–28.

194 Daniel W. Bjork, William James: The Center of His Vision (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1997), 230.

195 William James, “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” Youth’s Companion, June 7, 1906.

196 William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York, NY: Longmans, Green, 1907).

197 William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” (New York, NY: Longmans, Green, 1909).

198 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York, NY: Longmans, Green, 1909).

199 Bjork, William James, 257–61.

9
The Dawn of the 20th Century

1. America’s Rush Into a New Era