William Isaac Thomas
August 13, 1863 — December 5, 1947
William Thomas, the seventeenth president of the American Sociological Association, is famous for two main contributions: first, for planning and coauthoring The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1923), a pioneering empirical and theoretical inquiry into personality and social change; and second, for creating a purely constructionist social psychology, embodied in the concept “definition of the situation” and immortalized in the apophthegm “If men define situations as real, then they are real in their consequences.” A complex and even chaotic man, Thomas became the subject of legends long before his death. He was both a person and a myth.
Thomas the person was born to a white farm family in southwestern Virginia. His father was a Methodist minister and teacher who had turned farmer via marriage but entered the newspaper business after the devastation of the Civil War. Thomas completed BA, MA, and PhD degrees by 1886 at the University of Tennessee, studying English language and literature, and possibly doing field studies of language. After study in Germany, he taught English at Oberlin College from 1889 to 1893. Thomas’s Oberlin courses raised issues that would become central to his sociological work: comparison of world cultures, problems of the individual in rapidly changing societies, and multiperspectivalism. While managing the Oberlin exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, Thomas became a graduate student at the University of Chicago. By 1896, he had completed a PhD in sociology and become a faculty member. Between 1896 and 1914, Thomas’s extended themes from his Oberlin years. The comparative cultural framework drove him toward what was emerging as “anthropology” and flowered in the 1909 Source Book for Social Origins, which linked readings with theories of cultural comparison and became a widely used textbook.
Thomas’s interest in “the individual in changing societies” took shape in work with Swiss neurologist Adolf Meyer, then on his way to becoming America’s most eminent psychiatrist. In various articles, Thomas adapted Meyer’s emerging “life course” approach, merging it with multiperspectivalism because individuals were always shaped by their immediate (and multiple) social environments. Thomas also employed pragmatist concepts such as “adaptation” and “efficiency,” absorbed from his teachers (and friends) John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. By 1914, Thomas had assembled the social-psychological foundation of all his later work. He also had an empirical case in which to apply them when Chicago philanthropist Helen Culver awarded him a grant for the comparative study of peasantries. War aborted this comparative project. But the Polish case was already begun, and Thomas recruited Polish immigration official and philosopher Florian Znaniecki in 1914. The two produced the five-volume The Polish Peasant in Europe and America over the period from 1915 to 1923, using the casebook format already familiar to Thomas from his work with Meyer, his connections with social work, and his involvement in Chicago’s progressive reform movement.
Thomas left Chicago in 1918 in a much-mythologized episode, but although his financial situation became complicated, he was happy to leave academia. Moving to New York, he became a “free-floating intellectual,” teaching occasionally at local universities, working with the Social Sciences Research Council (where he helped create “culture and personality studies”), and producing several books, both on his own and in collaboration. In 1934, Thomas and his wife ended their long-flexible 46-year marriage so that Thomas could marry his young collaborator Dorothy Swaine Thomas, who herself would become president of the American Sociological Association in 1952. Following his new wife to Berkeley, Thomas occasionally mentored Berkeley graduate students. He died at age 84, on December 5, 1947.
William I. Thomas the myth was a licentious old man caught in a love tryst and charged under the Mann Act. In fact, charges were dropped and the tryst companion went home from the courtroom with Thomas and his wife. In the myth, Thomas’s career was destroyed. In fact, he produced most of The Polish Peasant, all of The Unadjusted Girl, and some considerable part of The Child in America after leaving Chicago. In the myth, Thomas was scandalous. In fact, his friend and funder—Chicago socialite, reformer, and activist Ethel Sturges Dummer—wrote the matter off after a few months. Later eras produced later myths: that Florian Znaniecki provided the main ideas of The Polish Peasant and that Dorothy Swaine Thomas deserved credit for the famous constructivist dictum about consequences. In fact, the general theoretical framework for The Polish Peasant appeared in Thomas’s work before his first meeting with Znaniecki, and the phraseology of the Thomas theorem appeared in Thomas’s work before he met Dorothy Swaine Thomas. (For details on these matters, see Abbott and Egloff 2008: 219 and 231–233).
Thomas became president of what was then the American Sociological Society (now Association) in 1927. Not surprisingly his theme was “The Relation between the Individual and the Group,” and his presidential address was “The Behavior Pattern and the Situation.” Thomas was a transitional figure: more a free intellectual than an academic, more a creator than a discoverer, more a poet than a scientist. He lived in the moment and cared little about posterity. All the same, he designed and cowrote a study that was among the first major products of American sociology and that remains among its greatest.
Biography by Andrew Abbott, University of Chicago
Selected Works by William I. Thomas
1909. Source Book for Social Origins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1917. “The Persistence of Primary Group Norms in Present-Day Society and their Influence on Our Educational System.” Pp. in 159-197 in Suggestions of Modern Science Concerning Education, edited by H. S. Jennings, J.B. Watson, A. Meyer, and W.I. Thomas. New York: Macmillan.
1918-1921 (with F. Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Vols 1, 2, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vols 3–5, Boston: Richard G. Badger.
Works about William I. Thomas
Abbott, Andrew and R. Egloff,. 2007. “The Polish Peasant in Oberlin and Chicago: The Intellectual Trajectory of W. I. Thomas.” American Sociologist 39: 217-258.
Odum, Harold W. 1951. “W. I. Thomas.” American Sociology: The Story of Sociology in the United States through 1950”. Pp. 141-144. New York: Longmans, Green and Co.
Obituary
Written by Ellsworth Faris, published in The American Journal of Sociology, 1948.
W. I. Thomas died at Berkeley, California, on December 5, I947, in his eighty-fifth year. He was among the very first to receive a doctorate in sociology and so, though he was not one of the founders of our science, he was easily chief among the epigones. Men like Ward and Small had to fight for recognition and a place in the sun; Thomas could devote his energies to creative work instead of combat.
And few have left more to show for their efforts. He wrote The Unadjusted Girl, a model study of an age-old social problem, scientific and objective, based, as was all his work, on verified facts, in contrast to the usual sentimental and reformist treatment. In The Child in America he gave us a definitive inventory of the agencies, organizations, and institutions that are set up to guide and to correct our youth, a study based on firsthand investigation, admirable in its inclusiveness and objectively frank in revealing the need for more scientific procedures-a need that still exists. His Primitive Behavior is a comprehensive study of preliterate life in those-aspects whose comparative differences are significant and fruitful to study, revealing much useful knowledge about human nature. Thomas did no field work but he laid under tribute a truly vast literature, requiring years of patient and expert work in the great libraries.
He made numerous other contributions, but the magnum opus was, of course, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, credit for which he generously shared with Znaniecki. The work involved prodigious labor, its method was rigorous and exact, and its contributions to theory give it a place among the few outstanding products of American sociology now numbered among our classics.
Of the many useful concepts-useful because fruitful in further research-one thinks of “crisis,” “life-organization,” “definition of the situation,” the “four wishes,” and several more. But his conception of “social attitudes” not only has been indispensable to social psychologists but has been the occasion of some of the most significant developments in recent years in the study of human nature. Thomas did not coin the word “attitude”-indeed he scorned neologisms-nor was he the first to speak of the “attitude” of a man; but to him belongs the credit of making the term a scientific tool. He had no mathematics, but the expert statisticians discovered that attitudes could be counted, then that they could be measured, even that they could be deliberately changed into units, such as a regiment of soldiers, and that the change could, in turn, be proved and measured. At present, attitude research occupies the energies of some of our most gifted men.
Thomas came into sociology from literature and, throughout, displayed many of the qualities of the artist. He was a great favorite as a lecturer, was a brilliant conversationalist, and had a large circle of devoted friends.
He loved to work with his hands, and his hobbies were something out of the ordinary. Dissatisfied with the finish of a dining table, he contrived a better furniture polish. Finding his golf ball inferior, he invented an improved one. He had a zest for life and was never bored. He had learned, no matter what he was doing, to have a good time doing it.
It is good for American sociology that he was allowed to live out a full span of years. He has set a high mark and inspired many to emulation. To him were given the ten talents, and to these he faithfully added other ten. And, since the students, in the long run, sit in judgment on the teachers, we all say: Well done.
Faris, Ellsworth. 1948. In Memoriam: William Isaac Thomas, 1863-1947. American Journal of Sociology. 53(5):387.
