Herbert Blumer
March 7, 1900 – April 13, 1987
Herbert Blumer served as the 46th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, “Sociological Analysis and the ‘Variable’,” was delivered on Saturday, September 8, 1956 during the Association’s Annual Meeting in Detroit, Michigan (later published in the December 1956 issue of ASR, Vol 21 Number 6, pp 683-690).
Obituary
Written by Troy Duster, published in Footnotes, August 1987
Herbert Blumer, Professor Emeritus at Berkeley and a towering presence in American Sociology for many decades of its development and growth, died after a long illness at the age of 87, April 13, 1987. As the premier interpreter and carrier of the tradition of George Herbert Mead, Blumer founded, named, and developed the “Symbolic Interactionist” perspective. Despite his tenacious hold on this position and his vigorous defense of it, Herbert Blumer was the model of graciousness in his ecumenical approach to the discipline of Sociology.
Blumer was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. When his father’s business was destroyed by fire, he dropped out of high school to help support his family. Two years later, after self-directed study, he passed an entrance examination to gain admittance to the University of Missouri. While other professions would occupy him for a period, this was the beginning of a lifetime devoted to his primary passion, scholarship. He received both his Bachelor’s (1921) and Master’s (1922) degrees from the University of Missouri, and continued on at that institution for a three-year stint as an instructor (1922-25).
In 1925, Blumer left Missouri to enter the doctoral program at the University of Chicago. He would earn his doctorate there (1928), and remain on the faculty for the next 24 years. However, as a graduate student at Chicago (and two years beyond), Blumer would earn his way and supplement his meager income by playing professional football with the Chicago Cardinals, precursors to the team that later moved to St. Louis as the current franchise in the National Football League. In 1928, Blumer was named an All-American Guard.
At Chicago, Blumer served as editor of the American Journal of Sociology for a dozen years (1940-52). He also had a reputation as a skillful labor arbitrator, and became Chairman of the Board of Arbitration (1945-47) for the United States Steel Corporation and the United Steel Workers of America. In addition, he served as a Chief Liaison Officer of the Office of War Information in the State Department during the Second World War.
In 1952, he accepted an appointment to head the Department of Sociology and Social Institutions at the University of California, Berkeley. It was in this role that Blumer would leave one of his major legacies to the discipline. This was a period of growth, expanding budgets, and wide-ranging discretion and authority in the role of the chair. Blumer used this position to become the architect of probably the most diverse and distinguished sociology faculty ever assembled. Despite his strong commitment to his own version of what sociology ought to do, be or become, in that first decade, Blumer presided over the Department and played a central role in orchestrating the convergence of a faculty that not only included among its members some of the most important scholars in their respective fields, but involved a range of different and competing perspectives. By the middle of the 1960s, the Berkeley Department was firmly established as one of the leading sociology faculties in the world.
His own work was lodged in the tradition of American pragmatism, of James, Dewey and Mead. Indeed, it could be said that Herbert Blumer was the last, great sonorous voice of that tradition in this century. His book, Symbolic Interactionism was an attempt to lay out the central premises of a way of seeing the social world. But Blumer’s contribution to sociology is not easily consigned to a singular perspective or a theoretical or methodological contribution. Equally important to his work are two articles that have attained the status of classics. The first was on “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position” (ASR, Spring 1958). This was a sophisticated analysis of race that would prefigure a new way of conceptualizing race conflict, taking it to another level from a preoccupation with individualized or personal prejudice. The second is the oft-cited essay on collective behavior.
Among his many honors, Blumer was elected President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1954), the American Sociological Association (1955), and the Pacific Sociological Society (1971). In 1983, he received the highest honor of the American Sociological Association, the Award for a Career of Distinguished Scholarship. The following year, he received the Berkeley Citation for his outstanding contributions to the University of California. He was Chairman of the Board of Directors of Transaction, and served tirelessly on the editorial boards of a dozen journals.
For all these honors and contributions, Herbert Blumer will be remembered best by those who knew him as a gentle man who cared deeply about social justice. He maintained dignity, grace, and bearing and that magnificent presence as he strode down the hallways even well into his eighties. In dialogue, exchange, or argumentation, he always maintained that dignity, and made it a feature of every interaction.
