Robert S. Lynd, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,
and Middletown
Charles E. Harvey*
Robert and Helen Lynds celebrated studies, Middletown and
Middletown in Transition, were reassessed in these pages several
years ago by sociologist-historian Richard Jensen as part of the
observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the
first volume in 1929.’ Jensen held that the Lynds had made a
signal contribution to shifting sociology “away from the reformoriented community survey toward a scientific study of culture.”
Yet he took them to task for what he considered inadequate methods of empirical analysis of social trends and a penchant for speculation. The issue is not new. In fact, the Lynds’ original investigation of Muncie, Indiana, involved an ongoing struggle with
their sponsoring organization, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s, Institute
of Social and Religious Research, over the empirical validity of
their “anthropological” categories of interpretation. The question
that Jensen raised may be seen in broader historical perspective
through an examination of that earlier dispute, as revealed in
the papers of the younger Rockefeller. The story strongly suggests
that alternative modes of conducting social science are rooted in
the dynamics of class relations.
Jensen rightly observed that “Middletown was a stunning
success.’’ Reflecting the view of liberal intellectuals at the time,
Frederick Lewis Allen remarked in his popular contemporary
* Charles E. Harvey is professor of history at California State University,
Chico. He gratefully acknowledges grants from the American Philosophical Society for research and wishes to thank Joseph w. Ernst and the staff of the
Rockefeller Archive Center for their helpfulness, as well as the Indiana Historical
Society for the opportunity to present this material in a talk a t a conference in
Muncie in September, 1981.
Richard Jensen, “The Lynds Revisited,”Zndiana Magazine ofHistory, LXXV
(December, 1979), 303-19; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown
(New York, 1929); idem, Middletourn in Transition; A Study in Cultural Conflicts
(New York, 1937).
Lynd, Rockefeller, and Middletown
33 1
account of the 1920s, Only Yesterday, “I have made frequent
use . . . of the extraordinarily varied and precise information collected in Middletown, that remarkable sociological study of a n
American city. . . : I do not see how any conscientious historian
of the Post-war Decade could afford to neglect this mine of material.”2 But Raymond B. Fosdick, Rockefeller’s key adviser and
the man who held the purse-strings of the sponsoring agency, had
opposed its publication on the grounds that it was too ‘‘s~opey.’’~~
Perhaps filling in the specific historical setting for this disagreement, which Jensen renewed, will make abstract arguments more
concrete.
Jensen’s critique raised several points which should be considered. While the Chicago school of sociology-largely financed by
the Rockefellers-ignored Middletown in their search for “a hard
science of society,” the Lynds broadened the discipline by using
an anthropological concept of modernization which focused on the
impact of industrialization on values and personalities. Jensen
argued, however, that they turned their report into a “morality
tale. . . exposing the contradictions of modernization” by stressing the degradation of working class life under the domination
of the business class, which “was responsible for all the innovations, and thus all the problems.” Jensen also held that the Lynds
failed t o consider Max Weber’s theory that religion initiated
economic modernization and shaped the business ethic because
they were “committed to the proposition that technology was the
basic causal force in modernization, from which behavior, attitudes, and values flowed.” (In their second study a decade later,
he wrote, they dropped “the cutesy anthropology of the first volume.” Hoping that the Depression would undermine the business
ethic with its blind faith in automatic progress, they supported
the New Deal and “believed in the necessity of national planning.”) Jensen did not explicitly accuse the Lynds of a vulgar
Marxist materialism, nor did he commit himself t o a Weberian
critical idealism. He concluded only that “. . . Robert Lynd was
[later] overshadowed a t Columbia [University] by more theoretical and more quantitative sociologists who lost sight of the comJensen, “The Lynds Revisited,” 303; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday:
An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twentzes (New York, 19311, 358.
i Raymond B. Fosdick to Galen M. Fisher, December 31, 1925, Group 2, Box
44, The Private Archives of the Messrs. Rockefeller (Rockefeller Center, New
York City). Most of the papers of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., remain at t h e archives,
hereafter cited as PAMR. The Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) in Tarrytown,
New York, is the official repository offamily and related papers and will eventually
hold the papers now in New York City.
332
Indiana Magazine o f History
munity midway between microscopic technical studies and grand
macroscopic t h e o r i e ~ . ” ~
Whether or not the Lynds were technological determinists is
moot, but they certainly did emphasize class as a determinant of
culture. The overarching reality of “Middletown,” as they presented it, was an inequitable division along class lines. Their
books remain devastating critiques of business ideology as the
unifying force of a community whose behavior belied its official
creed of equal opportunity and moral solidarity. They obviously
hoped that their work would revive a more realistic social consciousness, even if, as Jensen would have it, their image of greater
working class self-awareness in the 1890s may have been exaggerated.
Robert Lynd was a committed progressive in the age of Coolidge conservatism, and Middletown conveys this perspective unmistakably. As an intellectual, he sympathized with the ruled
rather than with the rulers. Later, in 1939, he protested formally
against the dominant mode of social science, which he knew intimately from his close association with its Rockefeller-financed
mobilization in the 1920s through the Social Science Research
Council. In Knowledge for What? T h e Place of Social Science i n
American Culture, he called for its transformation from a n instrument of class rule into a technique of human liberation and
fulfillment:
There is no other agency in our culture whose r61e it is to ask long-range and, if
need be, abruptly irreverent questions of our democratic institutions; and to follow
these questions with research and the systematic charting of the way ahead. The
responsibility is to keep everlastingly challenging the present with the question:
But what is it that we human beings want, and what things would have to be
done, in what ways and in what sequence, in order to change the present so as
to achieve it?. . . With such research and planning, we may yet make real the
claims of freedom and opportunity in America.5
Jensen, “The Lynds Revisited,” 305, 307, 316, 318.
Robert S. Lynd, Knowledge for What?T h e Place ofSocial Science i n American
Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1939),250. Barry D. Karl, Charles E. Merriam and the
Study of Politics (Chicago, 19741, offers a penetrating analysis of the underlying
tension within the social sciences during the interwar period, identifying Merriam
on the one hand and historian Charles A. Beard on the other as the primary
protagonists. The lines were not clear-cut, according to Karl, but differences of
emphasis led by 1933 to a profound cleavage. The schism is perhaps best expressed
in Beard’s criticism of the report of President Herbert Hoover’s Committee on
Recent Social Trends in that year. This report, prepared under the auspices of
the Social Science Research Council and with Merriam’s leadership, was financed
by Rockefeller funds. Lynd would certainly have agreed with Beard’s statement
that “The scientific method is only a method. Dreams, plans, purposes, and collective will must come from the human mind and heart. Where they exist, science
can discover the facts that condition realization and furnish instrumentalities for
carrying plan and purpose into effect.” See Karl, Merriam, 223, citing Beard’s
review in Social Forces, XI (May, 19331, 510.
L y n d , Rockefeller, and Middletown
333
These are matters that Jensen obscured because he avoided
the whole issue of power which divides society. For this reason
he missed the real story of Middletown and its role in the shaping
of modern social science. Ironically, the sacrificial youthful efforts
of Robert and Helen Lynd have become the stock-in-trade of many
academics who lack the Lynds’ concern for the needs and aspirations of ordinary working people and the unemployed, although
their minority voice has found amplification in the work of some
younger scholars today.‘j One can hope to share in this late realization of the Lynds’ deeper ideals by recounting the long-secret
inner story of the origins of their classical project in the context
of a massive program devoted to a different kind of social science
and sponsored by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. One trusts that the
materials used will not appear to be, as Jensen saw much of the
Lynds’ evidence, a deceptive facade for mere speculation. For the
writing of Middletown and the relationship which it involved,
however indirect, between Robert S. Lynd and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., constitutes one of the most enlightening episodes of the
1920s precisely because of its exposure of the connection between
social power and thought about ~ o c i e t y . ~
First, it is necessary to understand how Rockefeller came to
support social science research. The heir to the world’s greatest
fortune received his baptism of fire when in April, 1914, he unexpectedly found himself a t the center of social and political controversy. The death of several women and children at Ludlow,
Colorado, brought the long, violent strike in that state’s coalfields
to national attention. Despite his denials, the United States Industrial Commission exposed Rockefeller’s firm support of his
company’s rigidly antiunion policy. Coming a t the climax of
America’s post-Civil War industrialization, as the reforms of the
first Wilson administration sought t o adjust democracy to centralized finance capitalism, Ludlow suddenly made Rockefeller
6 A good sampling of recent work is to be found in Robert F. Arnove, ed.,
Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad
(Boston, 1980); a pioneering effort was David Eakins, “The Development of Corporate Liberal Policy Research (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 1966).
Journal ofthe History ofSociology, I1 (Fall-Winter, 1979-1980),was a Robert
S. Lynd special issue featuring articles by Staughton Lynd and others as well as
reprints of several early pieces by Robert Lynd. For a more extensive discussion
of the subject beyond his relationship with Lynd, see Charles E. Harvey, “John
D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Social Sciences: An Introduction,” Journal of the
History of Sociology, IV (Fall, 1982), 1-31.
334
Indiana Magazine of History
the symbol of the nation’s fundamental problem: concentrated
economic power and its responsibility to society.8
Guided by eminent and shrewd advisers, Rockefeller adopted
a labor and public relations policy intended to avoid industrial
conflict while preserving managerial control. Equally important,
he sponsored a wide range of programs aimed at maintaining
class harmony under corporate capitalism. Among the agencies
he financed for this purpose, the one closest to his own heart, at
least at its inception, was the Institute of Social and Religious
Research. In 1923 the Institute hired Robert S. Lynd to conduct
an innovative study of a small industrial city, a project which
was to be the centerpiece of its endeavor^.^
Lynd, a banker’s son from New Albany, Indiana, and a 1914
graduate of Princeton, had risen rapidly in the publishing business in New York until 1919, when he entered Union Theological
Seminary in that city. According to his son, he was inspired by
an experience when he was hospitalized, perhaps during the influenza epidemic of 1918, of directly helping other convalescents.
“Serving the people seems the biggest happiness of which I am
capable,” he wrote in 1920 in explanation of his new vocation,
“and I am simply cutting across lots as straight as I can after it.”
As summer field work for his seminary training, in 1921 Lynd
went out to serve the churches of the Elk Basin, Wyoming, oil
fields.1° The following spring he took it upon himself to write
Rockefeller about the deplorable living conditions of the workers
and their families because the fields belonged to a subsidiary of
Indiana Standard, in which Rockefeller remained the major stockholder. Lynd urged Rockefeller to make good on his well-publicized industrial “liberalism” by seeing that life was improved for
the oil workers. Rockefeller took the matter up at a private dinner
with the formidable president of the company (against whom he
later led a proxy fight over matters pertaining to the Teapot Dome
scandal) but did not reply to Lynd. In June Lynd wrote again
urging Rockefeller to act. This time Rockefeller responded, expressing appreciation for Lynd’s interest and assuring him that,
* The most complete treatment is George S. McGovern and Leonard F. Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War (Boston, 1972); the standard biography, by Rockefeller’s closest adviser, is Raymond B. Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait
(New York, 1956).
Charles E. Harvey, “John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Interchurch World
Movement of 1919-1920:A Different Angle on the Ecumenical Movement,” Church
History, LI (June, 1982), 198-209, provides the background for the Institute.
lo Staughton Lynd, “Robert S. Lynd The Elk Basin Experience,” Journal of
the History of Sociology, I1 (Fall-Winter, 1979-1980), 14.
L y n d , Rockefeller, a n d Middletown
335
while his own concern for the workers was vastly greater than
Lynd’s could be, longstanding problems were not easily solved.ll
Lynd grew impatient with Rockefeller’s apparently evasive
stance on union recognition and his method of persuading management to attend to workers’ needs, so in the fall of 1922 he
published two articles that held the capitalist’s feet to the fire:
“Crude Oil Religion” in the September issue of Harper’s and “Done
in Oil” in the November Suruey. In the latter Lynd not only
indicted life in the oil fields but went on to cite a Federal Trade
Commission report on Indiana Standards domination of the whole
region, adding quotations from his own correspondence with Rockefeller and the company president, who had held that changes
were not economically feasible.12
The crux of Lynd‘s argument was that Indiana Standard allowed a twelve-hour day and a seven-day week for many men in
a wholly controlled subsidiary, thus evading the labor practices
Rockefeller had long and prominently upheld. Lynd forcefully
concluded that only union organization throughout the industry
could provide a long-term solution to such problems as he had
exposed. Rockefeller’s response, printed in the same issue of S u r uey, was a vaguely humanitarian stand, upholding the labor policies of the companies in which he had substantial influence and
claiming that the Elk Basin situation was exceptional. For this
pronouncement he received the praise of his associates. His minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, wrote him that he was “doing a n
incalculable service in coming out so freely and sanely on the side
of industrial liberali~m.”’~
Lynd’s attack, however, struck a t the heart of Rockefeller’s
industrial “liberalism” and, indeed, at his whole moral posture.
Rockefeller had stated in his published response to Lynd: “So far
as concerns the discharge of my own responsibility as a stockI’ See Robert s. Lynd to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., March 11, 1922, Group 1,
Box 132, PAMR; Lynd to Rockefeller, June 29, 1922, ibid.; Rockefeller to Lynd,
July 3, 1922, ibid.; the file containing these letters also contains other pertinent
correspondence.
l 2 Robert S. Lynd, “Crude Oil Religion,” Harper’s, CXLV (September, 1922),
425-34; idem, “Done in Oil,” Suruey, XLIX (November 1, 1922), 136-46, 175.
Harry Emerson Fosdick to Rockefeller, October 31, 1922, Group 1, Box 132,
PAMR. A few years later when the preacher waxed too eloquent one Sunday on
industrial evils, he got a clear, if diplomatic, letter from his chief patron to the
effect that that was long ago and far away from their enlightened age; see Rockefeller to Harry Emerson Fosdick, December 19, 1927, Group 5, Box 62, ibid. For
a broader picture of their relationship, see Robert Moats Miller, “Harry Emerson
Fosdick and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: The Origins of a n Enduring Association,”
Foundations: A Baptist Journal ofHistory and Theology, XXI (October-December,
19781, 292-304
336
Indiana Magazine of History
holder for better industrial conditions and relations, I have made
special provision for assistance in just such tasks as these, which
are sometimes onerous, often perplexing, but always close t o my
heart.” This was a veiled allusion to a small staff of industrial
relations experts he retained in the law offices of his chief personal
adviser, Raymond B. Fosdick, Harry’s younger brother. Fosdick’s
group carried on the work begun after Ludlow by the eminent
Canadian, W.L. Mackenzie King, of developing corporate grievance panels with labor representation and other meliorative programs. This “Colorado Plan” allowed workers to belong to unions
if they wished but did not recognize such unions formally or engage in collective bargaining. Rockefeller sought to spread this
approach, but he never budged from his resistance to what he
considered the forced unionization of the worker^.'^
Fosdick’s labor staff confirmed Lynd’s description of the Elk
Basin situation, and an independent study by the aggressive and
widely respected industrial staff of the maverick Russell Sage
Foundation kept pressure on Rockefeller to move ahead to outright union recognition and collective bargaining as the only sound
basis for labor relations. The personal attention that Rockefeller
gave to both Lynd’s and the Sage staffs criticisms indicates how
important the matter was for him.15
All sides concurred that class relations constituted the central
problem of civilization. In long letters to Rockefeller during and
after the Ludlow crisis King had presented his vision of the evolution of capital-labor relations as analogous to British constitutional history. In a series of addresses and articles, Rockefeller
expressed his view that King’s grievance system would restore
the preindustrial “personal relation” in industry between master
and apprentice.16And Raymond Fosdick, while a top official of the
League of Nations in 1919, had expressed his outlook in a letter
to his brother:
Labor should organize. I a m coming more and more to believe t h at the open shop
is fundamentally a wrong principle and while i t may have fitted things as they
I4 Charles E. Harvey, “Religion and Industrial Relations: John D. Rockefeller,
J r . , and the Interchurch World Movement of 1919-1920,” Research in Political
Economy, IV (1981), 199-227, deals with these themes.
l5In 1926 Fosdick’s labor relations staff became Industrial Relations Counselors, Inc.; the papers are located in Group 3, Box 16, PAMR. Rockefeller’s correspondence with the Sage staff is in Group 3, Box 14, ibid.;i t illustrates his
sensitivity to criticism and his trenchant defense of his policy.
IfiThe King-Rockefeller correspondence is in Group 5, Boxes 72-73, PAMR;
Rockefeller’s statements are printed in John D. Rockefeller, Jr., The Personal
Relation in Zndustry (New York, n.d.), which was published about 1922.
Lynd, Rockefeller, and Middletown
337
existed five years ago, it cannot possibly suit the temper of this age. But the better
labor is organized and the greater the degree of solidarity between labor unions,
the greater is the menace ofa labor dictatorship, which in most countries, I believe,
would be a dictatorship by the minority, just as it is in Russia today. The obvious
answer and the answer which I know will occur to your mind, is education-the
mellowing influence of the school and the church. If we had a century or two to
work this thing out in, I think that answer would be the right one; but we haven’t
a century or two. This matter is going to come to a crisis in the next decade; and
it is going to come, I fear, in passion and hatred in the same temper in which this
railroad strike is developing now in England.”
Internationally, Fosdick thought the League was needed to stabilize a world market that could provide a n economic basis for
peaceful class relations.’*
By 1920 Raymond Fosdick had become, in effect, the chancellor of Rockefeller philanthropy. As such, he sought to apply
that unprecedented benefice to the Archimedian point of class
relations by developing a science of society along the empirical
lines of his prewar studies of police systems for R~ckefeller.’~
Lynd
and the Sage people, on the other hand, called for the redistribution of economic power through union recognition and collective
bargaining. By stressing the interests of working people in this
way, Lynds Harper’s and Survey articles addressed the same issue
as Fosdick’s efforts, but from the opposite perspective.
Despite the public dispute in Survey between the world’s leading capitalist and an obscure seminary student, or perhaps because of it-given the inner dynamics of the Rockefeller circle at
the time-Lynd shortly received the coveted appointment as director of the small city study that was the focus of the work of
Rockefeller’s Institute of Social and Religious Research. This was
especially remarkable given the dearth of financing for such research a t the time. How, then, did this come about? What were
the circumstances surrounding this development?
For the younger Rockefeller, as for the nation and the world,
1919 had proven a pivotal year. While President Woodrow Wilson
17 Raymond B. Fosdick to Harry E. Fosdick, September 9, 1919, Box 5, Raymond B. Fosdick Papers (Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University,
Princeton, N.J.).
Raymond B. Fosdick to Rockefeller, September 18, 1919, printed in Raymond B. Fosdick, Letters on the League ofNutions (Princeton, N.J., 1966), 34. See
also idem, The Old Savage in the New Civilization (Garden City, N.Y., 1929).
l 9 This interpretation is developed in Harvey, “John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and
the Social Sciences,” which is based on research in the papers ofthe Laura Spelman
Rockefeller Memorial and other Rockefeller foundations a t RAC, in the Fosdick
Papers a t Princeton University, and in Rockefeller’s papers a t PAMR; see also
Daryl L. Revoldt, “Raymond B. Fosdick: Reform, Internationalism, and the Rockefeller Foundation” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of
Akron, 1982).
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Indiana Magazine of History
and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge fought over American membership in the League of Nations against the background of Russian
Bolshevism spreading throughout Europe and Asia, a mounting
wave of strikes and radical agitation led to antiradical political
repression and vigilante action in the United States.20Rockefeller’s advisers resisted his impulse to go to Europe, where the
Rockefeller Foundation heavily supported Herbert Hoover’s efforts to still the fires of revolution through food relief. They held
that his presence there would lend credence to the anticapitalist
slogans of the revolutionaries. He therefore accepted a n appointment to represent the public (rather than management) at the
President’s Industrial Conference in Washington, D.C.-a tribute
to his success in overcoming the onus of Ludlow. There his brand
of industrial “liberalism” failed to win the support of either management or labor and the conference broke up, leaving a major
steel strike to be crushed, and with it the labor movement.21
Deeply disturbed by the course of events at home and abroad,
at the end of the year Rockefeller, as he put it, “felt impelled to
throw myself. . . to the fullest extent” into the Interchurch World
Movement of 1919-1920.22This adventure took place after the
departure of Mackenzie King to assume leadership of the Liberal
party of Canada and before the return of Raymond Fosdick from
service as associate secretary general of the League of Nations.
It could be termed Rockefeller’s coming of age, although he was
then forty-five. It led directly to Lynd’s Middletown.
One of the most critical, though overlooked, events in modern
American church history, the Interchurch World Movement had
begun as a cooperative drive by the major Protestant denominations to raise $336 million for their overall domestic and foreign
outreach programs. Inspired in part by the $200 million raised
by the United War Work Campaign of late 1918, in which Rockefeller had enthusiastically participated, the churches mounted
a huge publicity campaign based on extensive field surveys of
global social and religious needs that they hoped to meet. Both
the war work and Interchurch drives were chaired by John R.
Mott, world-famous college evangelist, head of the North Amerao Arno J . Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and
Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918.1919 (New York, 1967), gives the general
background; Robert K . Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 19191920 (Minneapolis, 1955), gives the domestic scene.
These observations are based on research in papers relevant to Rockefeller’s
interest in industrial relations in the archives cited above and in the Rockefeller
Foundation’s administrative papers at RAG, along with standard sources.
22 Rockefeller to Cyrus R. McCormick, May 26,1920, Group 2, Box 40, PAMR.
Lynd, Rockefeller, and Middletown
339
ican YMCA, and leader of the cooperative missions movement of
America and Europe.23
The Rockefellers long had been the largest financial supporters of Mott and his organizations and had constructed a series
of YMCA buildings in colonial lands. They likewise benefited from
Mott’s contacts with college men and women in every country.
Since Mott had led the first great ecumenical missions conference
a t Edinburgh in 1910, the younger Rockefeller’s association with
his work had grown steadily, especially during World War I when
the Y’s took the lead in morale work with servicemen. Under the
auspices of his own antiprostitution Bureau of Social Hygiene,
Rockefeller had financed Fosdick as coordinator of YMCA and
interfaith morale work in the War Department. These activities
had reached their peak with the war work drive the week of the
Armistice and with Fosdicks subsequent direction of leisure pro-’
grams for the young Americans threatened by the danger of lax
moral standards in peacetime France. It was from this position
that Wilson had selected Fosdick, a former Princeton student of
the president, for t h e top American post in t h e League’s
~ecretariat.~~
After his Ludlow trauma, Rockefeller had become a strong
advocate of a unified “Church of the Future” whose YMCA-like
practical Christianity and social service would, he thought, promote class harmony.25 This concept had led to his excitement
about the promise of the Interchurch‘s cooperative fundraising
drive as the financial nucleus of an efficient, centrally administered, forward-moving world religious crusade. Perhaps an important part of his thinking is suggested by the objective of the
Laymen’s Foreign Mission Inquiry, which he initiated and financed in the early 1930s: this project was to itemize missions
projects so that contributors could underwrite only the specific
23 Eldon G. Ernst, Moment of Truth for Protestant America: Interchurch Campaigns Following World War One (Missoula, Mont., 19721, is the authoritative
work on the subject; it is based on Ernst’s even more thorough dissertation, “The
Interchurch World Movement, 1919-1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Yale University, 1968). C. Howard Hopkins, John R . Mott, 1865-1955: A
Biography (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1979), traces Mott’s remarkable career with due
reference to Rockefeller.
24 These observations are based on relevant materials in the Rockefeller archives; Raymond B. Fosdick’s autobiography, Chronicle of a Generation (New
York, 1958); Revoldt, “Raymond B. Fosdick”; a n anonymous, privately printed
volume, The War Work of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (n.p., n.d.), commissioned by
his wife and published for the family in the early 1920s; and contemporary
.
. reports
.
in the New York Times.
25 John D. Rockefeller. Jr.. “The Christian Church-What
Of Its Future?’ Saturday Evening Post, CXC’(February 9,1918), 16,37; this article also was printed
privately in pamphlet form a t that time and again in 1945 by Rockefeller.
S. EARLTAYLOR,SECRETARY
OF INTERCHURCH
WORLDMOVEMENT, AND JOHND. ROCKEFELLER,
JR.,APRIL5, 1920
Courtesy Rockefeller Archive Center,
North Tarrytown, N . Y .
RAYMONDB. FOSDICK,
1936
Courtesy Rockefeller Archive Center
North Tarrytown. N Y
Lynd, Rockefeller, and Middletown
341
programs they favored. This obviously would enhance the influence of the largest givers in shaping policies.26
Although the report on the 1919 steel strike that was issued
under Interchurch auspices was more pro-union than was his own
position, Rockefeller joined the Interchurch‘s budget review committee late that year. At the Movement’s kickoff World Survey
Conference in January, 1920, he presented his committee’s report,
which called for a maximal campaign budget, and gave his familiar talk on the church of the future. He soon became a member
of the executive committee, where a t a moment when denominational leaders wavered he offered a personal million-dollar
guarantee of Interchurch borrowing for the largest possible publicity drive. He later had cause to regret this financial
~ommitment.~~
Meanwhile, during a tour of sixteen eastern and midwestern
cities to win the backing of leading businessmen, Rockefeller
reached the peak of his enthusiasm for the Movement. Encouraged by its executive director, he asked his father to create a new
foundation of fifty to a hundred million dollars. Such a fund would
enable the Interchurch to become the basis for broad Protestant
unification on a liberal social and theological platform. The endowment would bind ministers of participating churches in a common pension fund and merge the denominations’ foreign and domestic mission programs. “I do not think we can overestimate the
importance of this Movement,” he wrote his father. “As I see it,
it is capable of having a much more far-reaching influence than
the League of Nations in bringing about peace, contentment,
goodwill and prosperity among the people of the earth.’728
Making
a less idealistic pitch to an old friend, he observed,
I know of no better insurance for a businessman for the safety of his investments,
the prosperity of the country and the future stability of our government than this
Movement affords, for in the last analysis all of these are dependent on the
The records of the Laymen’s Inquiry are in Group 2, Box 43, PAMR. For
further background see Charles E. Harvey, “Speer versus Rockefeller and Mott,
1910-1935,” Journal ofPresbyterian History, LX (Winter, 1982), 283-99, especially
294-95.
An undated, typed memorandum with no indication of authorship, entitled
“Interchurch World Movement,” in Rockefeller’s papers provides a clue to his
staff‘s concerns. It cites passages from the minutes of the executive committee of
the Interchurch, of which Rockefeller was a member after January, 1920, which
could be used in court to establish his personal liability for all outstanding Interchurch debts. Correspondence between Raymond B. Fosdick and longtime Rockefeller staff attorney, Starr J . Murphy, concerning these matters suggests t h at it
was prepared by Murphy. See Group 2, Box 41, PAMR.
1x John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to John D. Rockefeller, April 21, 1920, ibid.
Indiana Magazine of History
342
character of our people, and the Church is the greatest instrumentality for the
development and maintenance of character. On these grounds of personal and far
reaching public importance I am taking the liberty of suggesting a gift from you
of ten thousand dollars.29
Unfortunately for Rockefeller the whole effort backfired, succeeding for the denominations but failing for the separate Interchurch
appeal. While the churches raised half their goal, $176 million,
the central organization raised only $3 million of its $40 million
target, and even that came mostly from the R o ~ k e f e l l e r s . ~ ~
Rockefeller’s intense disappointment is apparent in his last
desperate appeal to family connection Cyrus R. McCormick, in
which he lamented that “the feeling is growing every day stronger
upon me that if it fails to solve the problem of civilization then
only the deluge is left. . . .”31 Worse, beyond losing the millions
he had invested in church amalgamation, Rockefeller’s milliondollar guarantee to insure the full-budget promotional drive made
him legally liable, according to his staff lawyer, for the entire
remaining Interchurch debt of $6,5 million. Even more damaging
would have been the scandal which would have accompanied the
revelation of his role in a campaign notorious for its unseemly
big business methods, its centralizing intent, its liberalism-and
its failure.
Into the breach of this second but, unlike Ludlow, secret crisis
in Rockefeller’s life stepped Raymond Fosdick, who had resigned
from his League post when the Senate finally rejected American
membership in March, 1920. Warning about the danger of scandal, he persuaded Rockefeller to follow a plan he had deftly arranged with Methodist officials to let the capitalist make good on
his million-dollar guarantee in a n indirect way that would insulate him from the bulk of Interchurch debts. Fosdick then took
behind-the-scenes control of the Interchurch organization under
a virtual Rockefeller receivership, dissolved it as economically as
possible (while arranging for a documentary “history” that kept
Rockefeller’s role obscure for over sixty years), and yet saved its
principal assets for his employer.32
The most important of the assets were the field surveys of
religious and social needs on which the Interchurch had based its
Rockefeller to George F. Peabody, April 5, 1920, ibid.
Ernst, Moment of Truth, 144, 145.
31 Rockefeller to Cyrus R. McCormick, May 4,1920, Group 2, Box 40, PAMR.
McCormick replied that he was more optimistic and thought extending credits to
Europe while continuing to support ongoing church work would be more effective;
see McCormick to Rockefeller, May 17, 1920, ibid.
32 See the author’s articles on the Interchurch, cited above, for a more thorough
discussion of this episode.
zy
3n
Lynd, Rockefeller, and Middletown
343
financial appeal. Rockefeller wished to use these reports as a vehicle for creating a successor to the Interchurch which, with the
huge endowment he still envisioned, could proceed with his plan
to unify the Protestant churches and more effectively advance
the world mission he conceived for them. During the summer of
1920, as Fosdick disentangled him from the Interchurch, Rockefeller employed a few of its former officials to lay plans for the
new agency. At first known as the Committee on Social and Religious Surveys, it featured John R. Mott once again as chairman.
To hold the confidence of the churches as much as possible, the
Rockefeller group selected Charles R. Watson, president of the
American University of Cairo and a n Interchurch official, as the
Committee’s director. This was a strategic choice because Watson’s chief a t the Presbyterian mission board, Robert E. Speer,
was a consistent critic of Rockefeller and Mott for their tendency
to override the creedal and representative commitments of the
churches. Furthermore, Speer had just become president of the
Federal Council of Churches with a mandate from the denominations to restore its role, temporarily usurped by the Interchurch, as their primary means of c ~ o p e r a t i o n . ~ ~
Fosdick, however, had plans of his own. His brother Harry’s
sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” would soon spark the
most famous kulturkampf of the era when widely distributed by
Rockefeller’s public relations man, Ivy Lee. The scholarly minister quickly became the paladin of modernist forces in that battle.
But Raymond carried out a more subtle and far-reaching scheme.:34
Having rescued Rockefeller from the Interchurch fiasco during
the summer of 1920, he inherited Mackenzie King’s role as Rockefeller’s chief adviser on industrial relations; then, in mid-1921,
when the Rockefeller’s house attorney died, Fosdick assumed his
place as well. Rockefeller was devoting more of his own time to
his growing family; yet it became essential t o make long-range
plans for the huge foundations his father had created, which had
grown-beyond the bounds of constitutional theory-to major new
repositories of social power. Like their founder, the administrators
of these giant engines of social change were passing into old age.
Harvey, “Speer versus Rockefeller and Mott, 1910-1935.”
Material on the fundamentalist controversy is in Rockefeller’s correspondence with Harry Emerson Fosdick, Group 5 , Box 62, PAMR. The current standard
on the subject is George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture:
The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Euangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York, 1980).
On theological liberalism see William R. Hutchison, T h e Modernist Impulse i n
American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); and Harry Emerson Fosdick,
The Liuing of These Days: A n Autobiography (New York, 1956).
l4
344
Indiana Magazine of History
Fosdick, who had carefully ingratiated himself with Rockefeller’s
wife and children, had seen the heights of the world and proven
himself in a variety of assignments both within the Rockefeller
domain and in public affairs. Thus Fosdick’s vision would guide
the vast network of Rockefeller philanthropic enterprises in a
period when lack of large-scale government support for intellectual inquiry and the absence of comparable private undertakings
gave them unique influence. Here was the opportunity to give
meaningful direction to human history, but to what ends and by
what means?35
For Fosdick, the key lay in the application of empirical method
t o human nature. What was needed was a science of society. But
the associates of the elder Rockefeller, still in charge of the endowments, strongly resisted the prospect of exposing the family
name to a renewal of the political attacks it had weathered in
the past. Better to stick to medicine and public health! Fosdick
found the means of evading this opposition in a large new endowment created in 1918 in honor of the founder’s wife, the Laura
Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. Fosdick had assigned Charles R.
Watson to spend half his time administering the Memorial’s religious and charitable grants when Rockefeller retained the missionary educator to handle the as yet limited business of the
Committee on Social and Religious Surveys. When Watson felt
obligated to return to Egypt late in 1921, Fosdick found his great
opportunity. The Memorial could be reoriented from subsidizing
the budgets of numerous agencies that, according to Rockefeller
principles of giving, should become self-sufficient, to financing
pathbreaking research that would help to solve the underlying
problems of society. For this purpose, Fosdick arranged for
Beardsley Ruml, a brilliant and well-connected young industrial
psychologist, to become director of the Memorial. Galen Fisher,
an executive of Mott’s YMCA who had long served in Japan, was
then selected to head the Survey Committee, which under Fosdick’s orchestration dropped any ambition of becoming the vehicle
of church unification itself. Instead the Committee promoted liberal church unity through empirical social studies, renaming itself the Institute of Social and Religious Research.36
Throughout the 1920s Raymond Fosdick devoted his remarkable intelligence, charm, and energy to the unification of the
Rockefeller boards, with the Memorial as the component which,
See note 18.
See note 18;for further background see E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (Berkeley, Calif., 1979).
si
,‘j6
Lynd, Rockefeller, and Middletown
345
through social science, could in turn give direction to the advancement of physical science and of civilization in general. Ruml’s
final report after a decade on the cutting edge of social science
conveys the guiding concept:
In the autumn of 1922 the Trustees of the Memorial considered a n extended
memorandum outlining a possible program in the social sciences. Through the
promotion of the social sciences it was felt that there would come a greater knowledge a s to social conditions, a better understanding of social forces, and a higher
objectivity in the development of social policy. It was felt that through the social
sciences might come more intelligent measures of social control that would reduce
such irrationalities a s are represented by poverty, class conflict, and war between
nations. It was expected that this growing body of knowledge would prove helpful
in showing effective ways of promoting human welfare, and that through greater
understanding of man and his relations to other men the growing power over the
forces of nature would more likely be applied for good than for evil. The relevance
of such a field to the welfare interests of the Memorial appeared clear, and the
officers were encouraged to work out practical methods of attack.j7
Rather than conducting its own research, as the other Rockefeller boards did, the Memorial subsidized specific work at established institutions, primarily universities. Its key methodological criteria were “immediate personal observation of the social
problems or social phenomena,” the avoidance of “speculative,
bibliographical, or merely literary” work (a dig at Mackenzie
King’s culminating volume, Industry and Humanity), and interdisciplinary cooperation. It assumed that “the present categories
in social science-economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology-are essentially artificial, that their usefulness
as a basis for social research is limited, and that a synthesis is
necessary from which a new and more fruitful division of labor
To move American social science along these
may be achie~ed.”3~
lines, Ruml organized and financed the Social Science Research
Council, which he developed through a series of summer conferences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, known
as the “Hanover Conferences.”39
[Beardsley Ruml 1, T h e Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Final Report
(New York, 1933), 10-11. At the end of the 1920s the Memorial was succeeded by
the Spelman Fund, which financed programs in the field of public administration
and was led by Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago; Karl, Merriam,
118-39.
3H Quotes from [Ruml], Final Report, 11-12; the criteria clearly conflicted a t
points with Lynd’s approach and were used by Fosdick to criticize Lynd. W.L.
Mackenzie King, Industry and Humanity: A S t u d y in the Principles Underlying
Industrial Reconstruction (Boston, 1918).
39 Transcripts of the conferences are in the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Papers at RAC.
346
Indiana Magazine of History
Only insiders knew of Rockefeller’s intention of using the
Institute of Social and Religious Research to unify the churches
in class-harmonizing social service. Its publicly stated purpose
was simply to complete five field studies begun by the Interchurch:
Theological Education in America, the Red Man in the United
States, the St. Louis Church Survey, the Indiana Survey of Religious Education, and the Town and Country Church in the United
States. These were published within a few years, making notable
contributions in their fields. Further investigations were coordinated with a series of efficiency studies (conducted out of Fosdick’s
office) of institutions like the YMCA and YWCA, Boy and Girl
Scouts, the New York Public Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, institutions to which Rockefeller contributed substantially. Other new studies emerged out of the original concerns
of the Interchurch. Among these, the most important was the
development of a new type of community survey that would reveal
the dynamics of a typical small industrial city rather than simply
advance the work of the churches and charitable organizations.
This objective also fitted the aims of the Memorial and Fosdick’s
larger vision, so the small city survey was of wider interest than
most Institute projects both to those within the Rockefeller circle
and to outside academics who looked eagerly toward this unmatched source of manna for social research.40
The Interchurch officials who had planned for Rockefeller’s
successor organization late in 1920 had insisted on the importance
of a new method of survey work that would disclose “possibilities
40 [Galen M. Fisher], The Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1921 I934 [New York, 19341. The papers of the executive committee and Rockefeller’s
correspondence with the Institute are in PAMR, but Galen Fisher seems to have
destroyed the Institute’s administrative papers. At one point during the Middletown project Fisher asked Lynd to destroy their exchanges, but Lynd refused.
Walter Athearn wrote a three-volume study of religious education in Indiana:
Walter S. Athearn, E.S. Evenden, W.L. Hanson, and William E. Chalmers, The
Religious Education of Protestants in an American Commonwealth [Committee
on Social and Religious Surveys, The Indiana Survey of Religious Education, Vol.
I] (New York, 1923); Walter S. Athearn, et al., Measurements and Standards in
Religious Education, Containing Standards, Score-Cards, Scales and Other Instruments of Measurement Developed for Use in the Indiana Survey of Religious
Education [Institute of Social and Religious Research (formerly Committee on
Social and Religious Surveys), The Indiana Survey of Religious Education, Vol.
I11 (New York, 1924); Walter S. Athearn, Religious Education Survey Schedules,
Designed for Use in the Indiana Religious Education Survey, Prepared with the
Assistance of the Survey Staff and Cooperation Advisory Committees IInstitute of
Social and Religious Research, The Indiana Survey of Religious Education],Vol.
I11 (New York, 1924). Benson Y. Landis, Rural Church Life in the Middle West
(New York, 1922), which focused on Iowa and Indiana, was one of the twelve
volumes on the town and country church.
Lynd, Rockefeller, and Middletown
347
for cooperative social welfare work in the lumber camps, the harvest fields and other untouched centers of seasonal labor [which]
are hardly second to the welfare opportunities among soldiers and
sailors in the recent war.” They further held that “the community
approach is as important in China as it is in
In the fall
of 1922, as Rum1 shaped his plans for the Memorial, a series of
Institute sessions planned the long-contemplated small city survey. As would be the case with the Memorial’s extensive support
of research by Elton Mayo in industrial relations, the Institute’s
emphasis in its innovative community study was to be on the
“psychological.” This would “go deeper and will ultimately be
more significant to the churches of the city surveyed and t o the
religious life of other cities of similar size than would the customary type of objective
The man first considered for the position of project director,
William L. Bailey of Northwestern University, agreed, observing
that “I am as dissatisfied as anyone with all surveys of the pastincluding the one [H. Paul] Douglass and I are just now completing.” Given Bailey’s own admission and the developments
within Rockefeller philanthropy, it is not surprising that a t a
meeting on May 11, 1923, he was suddenly dropped and replaced.
What is surprising is t h a t his replacement was-Robert S.
L~nd!~~
At this meeting Institute of Social and Religious Research
advisers affirmed that the intention of the small city study was
not to serve the interests of established institutions like the
churches and the Y’s but to effect “singly and unitedly better
adjustments to the people for whom the agencies exist.” Robert
Lynd, who had good connections with the Memorial staff, especially his old friend, Lawrence Frank, stressed this new approach
in a letter t o Galen Fisher, the Institute’s director, the following
month: “The purpose of this survey is to produce not a n efficiency
survey of the churches. . . , but rather a new type of survey; a n
inquiry first and foremost into precisely what is the spiritual life
of the community, with especial reference to dynamic aspects, i.e.,
how do new spiritual impulses arise? What agencies evoke them,
dl
A.E. Cory to Rockefeller, August 31, 1920, Group 2, Box 43, PAMR.
Zbid.
d,i Galen M. Fisher, .‘A History of the Small City Study,” March 20, 1924;
Institute of Social and Religious Research Papers, Box 44, ibid.This work, along
with Fisher’s “Memorandum Regarding Small City Study #2,” April 16, 1924,
ibid.,provided Fosdick with Fisher’s side of his dispute with Lynd over Middletown, to be discussed below. After the E R R was terminated in 1934, H. Paul
Douglass became the editor of Christendom,the journal of the incipient World
Council of Churches. His papers are at Drew University.
Indiana Magazine of History
348
e t ~ . ? Lynd
” ~ ~ was obviously aligned with the thrust of thinking
at the pathbreaking Memorial. His background as a theology
student and his use of first-hand observation and solid scholarly
research in his Elk Basin articles perfectly suited Fosdick’s objective of turning the Rockefellers’ religious and charitable endowments to use in the development of a new kind of social science. Besides, one can imagine how Lynd’s public challenge to
Rockefeller would have appealed to the Young Turks at the
Memorial!
After attending Ruml’s Hanover Conference in the summer
of 1923, Lynd went further than he had in June, commenting
that “the conduct of men is in large part determined by the pressure of the conflicting group habits of their community,” which
he proposed to study over a time span with a view to “where new
things are h a ~ p e n i n g . Lynd
” ~ ~ strongly insisted that his work be
completely separated from the immediate practical concerns of
the churches. This set him against many on the Institute staff,
fitted the thinking of the staff of the Memorial, and served some
of Fosdick‘s aims while conflicting with others.
At the end of the year, having made preliminary arrangements, the Lynds went to Muncie. According to Helen Lynd’s
memoir, their approach was very open:
We had the encouragement of Clark Whistler, the anthropologist, and Larry
Frank. . . . We were very much interested in what it would look like for a n anthropological technique to be applied to a n American city. We were fascinated
with whether this would work. . . . Bob’s particular contribution was everything.
Planning it, thinking up things, imaginatively saying, “Well, if this, then that.”
He made friends with everybody. Any situation, whether it was Rotary Club or
singing in church or meeting with the Sewing Circle, it all worked into the study.
Then he would take those things and organize them. . . . It became very clear that
there were two classes in the community, which we called the business and the
working classes.46
But their style got them into trouble with those in New York who
reviewed their work:
After eight or nine months, the people a t the Institute were discontented because
they didn’t know where the study was going. And neither did we. Something
would come up, and that would lead to something else, which wasn’t on any chart.
That disturbed them a good deal. . . . Some of the most interesting material came
from things that couldn’t have been charted in advance.. , . But the Institute
people saw what they thought was a formlessness with no schedule being followed.
I think it was true that what we were doing didn’t fit into any category. Larry
Lynd to Fisher, June 29, 1923, as quoted in Fisher, “History,” 14-16
Lynd to Fisher, September 28, 1923, a s quoted in ibid.,18-19.
46 Helen Merrell Lynd, Possibilities (Youngstown, Ohio, 1980), 35-36.
44
45
Lynd, Rockefeller, and Middletown
349
ROBERTS. LYND,c. 1940
Courtesy Ball State University,
Public Information Services,
Muncie, Indiana.
Frank came in and talked to them, and it helped to give Bob the courage to try
to explain to them what he was trying to do and why. They decided reluctantly
to continue the s t ~ d y . 4 ~
The trouble came to a head in the spring of 1924, as revealed
in several memoranda written by Institute director Galen Fisher
for Fosdick and the board. Lynd had returned to New York briefly
to negotiate a more specific plan for the study, which had to have
Fosdick’s approval for Lynd to receive further financing. Conflict
erupted when Lynd refused to accept clauses inserted in his proposal by the Institute staff which would have tied his work more
closely to the churches. At one explosive point Fosdick’s dinner
at home in Montclair, New Jersey, was interrupted by several
irate phone calls he thought came from Lynd. Upon later hearing
Fosdick had told board members that it was he, Lynd vehemently
denied having been the caller. What had really happened is unclear, but Lynd won his freedom of action in Muncie, subject to
Institute review.4s
The Institute staff continued to criticize Lynd’s work, to his
irritation, and, when he and his wife completed the manuscript,
47
Ibid.,37.
4H
Fisher, “History,” 19; idem,“Memorandum.”
Indiana Magazine of History
350
the organization balked at printing it. Undoubtedly, the Lynds’
insistence that the division between the business class and the
working class constituted the fundamental, determinative fact of
life in Muncie-and their profoundly critical attitude toward the
business-dominated culture of the city-caused much of the opposition. After all, this was nearly the opposite of what Rockefeller
had hoped for in his effort to unite the churches in a social welfare
program or what Fosdick sought by developing an empirical, psychologically based science of society. Obviously it did not conform
to the pattern of outreach efficiency studies for churches and charitable agencies from which the Institute staff could not break,
however significant their contributions in that field.
Having read early parts of the manuscript, Fosdick warned
the Institute that
It certainly is different from anything that I imagined in connection with this
study when it was first proposed. It is very “scopey” and its range of ideas and
subjects is positively bewildering. I do not know that this is legitimate criticism.
It is just possible that this is a work of genius. On the other hand, my impression
is that there is greater possibility that Mr. Lynd will not be able, within reasonable
time, to bring his ideas down to earth in such a manner as to make their reading
understandable.49
Fosdick at first assumed that Lynd might take years and by then
be out of date, suggesting that the Institute could not finance him
indefinitely. Picking one term, “surrogate,” which Lynd had used
in a general rather than a legal sense, lawyer Fosdick challenged
Lynd’s whole interpretation of Muncie:
This single criticism standing by itself, may be, and probably is, unimportant,
but it illustrates what seems to be the tendency of the whole study, i.e., looking
a t the facts of Muncie not as objective phenomena but as they seem to appear
through the medium of predetermined principles and theories which may, or may
not be, fully digested. In other words, I get the impression of a confusion of theories
and facts-of fragments of reality mixed up with a lot of phraseology which may
be scientific-but perhaps
In this way Fosdick suggested that Lynd’s stress upon class division as the overwhelming reality of Muncie was merely a figment of the imagination or an import of alien ideology. He did
not, on the other hand, object to Elton Mayo’s theorizing about
the “bitter reflections on [their] work and situation” by workers
whose negative thoughts “issue in social as well as industrial
49
Raymond B. Fosdick to Fisher, November 20,1925, Group 2, Box 44, PAMR.
Ibid.
Lynd, Rockefeller, and Middletown
35 1
problems.” The Memorial financed Mayo’s work a t Harvard in the
late 1920s, and it became basic to corporate personnel programs.51
By implying that the established order and its institutions
formed the real, hard facts of the city, Fosdick sought to discredit
Lynd’s work on nonpolitical, “scientific” grounds. Lynd had insisted on the importance of division in society and the class perspective, which, when expressed in cultural forms linking the
subjective with the objective, could shape actual behavior observed by social researchers.s2 If Lynd’s inclinations could not be
channeled into the framework of class harmony within capitalist
society and its formal if unfulfilled democratic polity, his work
apparently had to be jettisoned.
Lynd, nevertheless, won the endorsement of the liberal academic giants of the period-philosopher John Dewey, sociologist
William Ogburn, and economist Wesley Mitchell whose support
was necessary for the Social Science Research Council and Fosdick’s larger aims for society through Rockefeller philanthropy.
At their urging, undoubtedly instigated by Lynd and his friends
a t the Memorial, the Institute submitted the book to L.C. Marshall, a trusted Rockefeller consultant a t the University of Chicago. When he judged it favorably, Fosdick waspishly informed
the Institute that,
If your technical staff can keep pretty closely in touch with Lynd, so a s to obviate
new eccentricities which might develop, I am sure the Trustees will be willing to
go ahead with it. , . . Lynds inclination is to soar. By all means let him soar, but
51 Elton Mayo to Dr. Herman Feldman of the Committee on Industrial Relations of the Social Science Research Council, March 30, 1928, Box 5 3 , Laura
Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Papers. A thorough discussion of the work of Mayo
and his relationship with the Memorial is provided in James P. Mulherin, “The
Sociology of Work and Organizations: Historical-Context and Pattern of Development” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of California,
Berkeley, 1979).
s2 Desuite Jensen’s disaarazine remark about the Lvnds’ “cutesv anthropology” in hi’s article about Middiktokn (p. 316), a great deal of seriois work was
being conducted in the 1920s on the role of society in shaping consciousness.
Particularly important was the work of George Herbert Mead a t the Rockefellerendowed University of Chicago, a s well a s the neo-Marxist work being done in
Europe by George Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School, including
Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse. As Benjamin Lee Whorf
wrote in 1942, “every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others,
in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality
not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of
relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his
consciousness”; see John B. Carroll, ed., Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected
Writings ofBenjamin Lee Whorf([Cambridge, Mass., and New Yorkl, 1971), 252.
Language is, of course, related to material circumstances and physical tools and
to the social relations involved in tool usage. The fact is, then, that Lynd creatively
employed the themes of the intellectual discourse of his period.
Indiana Magazine of History
352
he ought to come down occasionally to touch ground so that ordinary human
beings, like myself, can know what it is all about.“.’
Regardless of this lightly veiled hostility a t the time, Fosdick
praised the study thirty years later in his biography of Rockefeller, in which he used MiddZetown to burnish the billionaire’s
liberal image. Proudly, he termed the book a “pioneering study”
which reflected the “increasingly prominent place” given to “the
social background of the church” in the work of the Institute of
Social and Religious Research.54That aspect of the study accorded
with Fosdicks own aims; he did not mention the class division
the Lynds had stressed, which did not.
Ultimately, the Institute did not publish Middletown. As Helen
Lynd recalls, its staff thought that no one would. But when publisher Alfred Harcourt saw the manuscript, he immediately wired
the Lynds of his eagerness to print it. Two years had passed since
its completion. Lynd had used it as his dissertation a t Columbia
University, having somewhat artificially separated his own writing from his wife’s for that purpose. In these years he had been
employed first by the Commonwealth Fund as a researcher and
then, interestingly enough, as executive secretary of the Memorial-sponsored Social Science Research Council.
Upon its publication in 1929, Middletown became a n instant
sensation, receiving unprecedented front page reviews in both the
New York Times and the Herald-Tribune.55It has remained an
illuminating analysis of a typical American industrial city-and
of American society-ever since, perhaps because of rather than in
spite of Muncie’s Yankee homogeneity, which avoided a confusion
of class with ethnic differences. Regardless of methodological refinements in ensuing years, the Lynds’ descriptions of American
culture still ring true. In recognition of Robert Lynd’s achievement, Columbia appointed him a professor of sociology in 1931.
This review of the place of Rockefeller philanthropy in the
Lynds’ study of “Middletown” shows the similarity between inhouse criticism a t the time and that given recently in this journal
by Richard Jensen. Perhaps the account will raise important questions about the kind of social science that has prevailed in America since the 1920s, for Robert Lynd devoted his career to challenging the direction it was being given under large-scale
Rockefeller sponsorship in that decade. At first Lynd’s “anthropological” approach served the purpose of Raymond B. Fosdick,
Raymond B. Fosdick to Fisher, December 31,1925, Group 2, Box 44, PAMR.
Fosdick, Rockefeller, 213.
55 Lynd, Possibilities, 39.
53
54
Lynd, Rockefeller, and Middletown
353
who was then shifting the ample funds of the Laura Spelman
Rockefeller Memorial from the support of religious and charitable
agencies to the strategic promotion of social science within the
overall Rockefeller philanthropic enterprise. Fosdick shared his
patron’s view that class conflict was the basic threat t o civilization’s continued progress. But he believed that the solution to the
problem lay in developing a n empirical science that could control
society rather than in the vision of a unifying social service religion that inspired Rockefeller himself.
With Fosdick’s approval, Lynd became the director of a study
sponsored by Rockefeller’s Institute of Social and Religious Research. This survey of a typical small industrial city was intended
to clarify the role of religious and charitable agencies in their
community setting. While the Institute’s religiously oriented staff
criticized Lynd’s failure to maintain this focus as the work progressed, what apparently aroused Fosdick’s ire was the sociologist’s interpretation of the dynamics of social change in “Middletown.” Contrary to Fosdick’s and Rockefeller’s overriding concern
with resolving conflict between classes and maintaining harmonious “cooperation”-Rockefeller’s favorite term-Lynd focused
his entire study on the gap that separated the life of privileged
“nonmanual workers” from that of less favored “manual workers.”
This division, he and his wife held, provided the key to understanding the social processes of the community. They highlighted
the limited value system of the dominant business class and portrayed the distortions in people’s lives that resulted from the
prevailing power structure. As Helen Lynd commented, “I think
one of the best things in the two books was the chapter Bob wrote
in Middletown in Transition on the Middletown spirit, contrasting
the things Middletown said it lived by and the things it did live
by.”56This is the kind of awakened self-consciousness humanity
needs for personal liberation and common survival, and it is quite
different from a purportedly disinterested science of society that,
while claiming only t o describe things as they are, manages to
serve those who control society as it has, unfortunately, come to
be.
The Lynds’ study, precisely because it operated on different
assumptions from the social science methods advanced by Rockefeller money, suggested a more democratic alternative to those
methods. The couple’s outlook seems to have been rooted in the
56
Ibid.. 37.
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rural small town values of a n earlier era, values implicit in Robert
Lynd’s “call” to help people as a Protestant minister. This youthful
vocation had led him to hold Rockefeller publicly responsible for
deplorable living conditions he had witnessed in a n oil field of one
of Rockefeller’s companies. “Middletown,” then, amplified Lynd’s
earlier protest against the most eminent member of America’s
business class and the power to afflict the lives of ordinary wage
earners that Rockefeller symbolized. In doing so, this pioneering
community survey posed the inescapable issue of whose interests
are served by the practitioners of social science. Lynd’s was a
prophetic voice, and despite the celebrity of his (and his wife’s)
achievement in the Middletown volumes, it has remained a minority voice crying in the wilderness of Rockefeller-style “empirical” social science of the type advocated in Jensen’s article.