Wikipedia

Lester Frank Ward

Lester Frank Ward (June 18, 1841 – April 18, 1913) was an American botanist, paleontologist, and sociologist.[1] The first president of the American Sociological Association, Ward has been characterized as a pioneering figure in American sociology.[2] His 1883 work Dynamic Sociology was influential in establishing sociology as a distinct field in the United States.[3]

Lester Frank Ward
Lester Ward
Born
Lester Frank Ward

(1841-06-18)June 18, 1841
Joliet, Illinois, US
DiedApril 18, 1913(1913-04-18) (aged 71)
Washington, D.C., US
Alma mater
Occupations
Employers
Known forPaleobotany, Telesis, sociology, and the introduction of sociology as field of higher education
Spouse(s)Elizabeth Carolyn Vought (Lizzie); some sources give Elizabeth Carolyn Bought.
Parents
  • Justus Ward
  • Silence Rolph Ward

Career and Education edit

Civil War service edit

Ward enlisted in the Union Army to fight in the Civil War.[4] He suffered three gunshot wounds in the Battle of Chancellorsville and was discharged from service on November 18, 1864 due to physical disability.[2]

Education edit

After moving to Washington, Ward attended Columbian College, now the George Washington University, and graduating in 1869 with the degree of A.B. In 1871, after he received the degree of LL.B, he was admitted to the Bar of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. However, Ward never practiced law. In 1873, he completed his A.M. degree.

Research career and U.S. Geologic Survey edit

Ward concentrated on his work as a researcher for the federal government. At that time almost all of the basic research in such fields as geography, paleontology, archaeology and anthropology were concentrated in Washington, DC, and a job as a federal government scientist was a prestigious and influential position. In 1883 he was made Geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey. While he worked at the Geological Survey he became friends with John Wesley Powell, the second director of the US Geological Survey (1881–1894) and the director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution.

Ward was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1889.[5]

 
Ward and fossil tree trunks

Brown University Chair of Sociology edit

In 1892, he was named Paleontologist for the USGS, a position he held until 1906, when he resigned to accept the chair of Sociology at Brown University.

Works and ideas edit

Ward hoped to use his scientific literacy to contribute an American version of historical-materialist Sociology, opposing the then popular work of Herbert Spencer with critique inspired by Karl Marx. Working in the Enlightenment tradition, Ward associated his project with the advancement of democratic principles in the United States. As Ward explained in the Preface to Dynamic Sociology: Or Applied Social Science as Based Upon Statistical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences, it was his belief that: "The real object of science is to benefit man. A science which fails to do this, however agreeable its study, is lifeless. Sociology, which of all sciences should benefit man most, is in danger of falling into the class of polite amusements, or dead sciences. It is the object of this work to point out a method by which the breath of life may be breathed into its nostrils."[6]

Impact on sociology in America edit

Ward was significant for founding American Sociology in an historical-materialist paradigm that avoided Cartesian dualism and distinguished democratic-developmentalist social institutions.[citation needed] Ward's influence in certain circles (see: the Social Gospel) was also affected by his Enlightenment views regarding organized priesthoods, which he believed had been responsible for more evil than good throughout human history.[citation needed]

Lester Ward promoted the introduction of sociology courses into American higher education.[citation needed] His Enlightenment belief that institution-building could be scientifically informed was attractive to democratic intellectuals during the Progressive Era. Ward's version of social science was based in organicist Enlightenment theories of comparative knowledge for democratic development, as distinguished from the mechanist version of science associated with Spencer's version of Sociology, and which later came to dominate the Anglo-American sciences and, along with micro symbolic interactionism and ethnography, sociology in the Cold War.

Nature, evolution and conservation edit

Ward had a lifelong interest in nature, beginning in childhood and extending throughout his time as a government clerk active in local biological societies, and as a formally trained paleobiologist.[7] Ward engaged with Lamarckian ideas, or the theory that the natural environment shapes organisms. Ward wrote on the topic in Neo-Darwinism and Neo-Lamarckism[8], and was enthusiastic in his support of Darwin's findings and theories. Reflecting a popular trend at the time, Ward made connections between evolution and his perspectives on society.

Ward understood human conflict and war as evolutionary forces responsible for progress.[9] From Ward's perspective, conflict enabled the rise of Homo Sapiens over other creatures, and saw the expansion of what he considered to be more technologically advanced races and nations.[10] Ward saw war as a natural evolutionary process that could be painful, slow, and ineffective.[11] He argued to recognize these characteristics of war, but to replace it with a more progressive system which minimized harm.[12]

Alongside George Perkins Marsh, John Wesley Powell, and W J McGee, Ward's ideas concerning conservation and the management of natural resources helped to inform the conservation movement of the early 20th century.[13] However, the extent of Ward's contributions to scientific understandings of nature has been debated, with John Burnham writing that "Ward's unbelievable egotism and his ostentatious display of technical terminology misled many writers into believing he was a "great" or "distinguished" natural scientist."[14]

Welfare state and Laissez Faire edit

Ward was a supporter of the concept of the welfare state. Ward argued that those critical of the development of a social safety as 'paternalistic' were hypocritical for themselves receiving "relief from their own incompetency" in their private enterprise as capitalists and industrialists.[15] Ward's ideas influenced a rising generation of progressive political leaders, such as Herbert Croly, and his ideas came to help shape early welfare policy in the United States.[16] However, there are few demonstrable direct links between his writings and the actual programs of the founders of the welfare state and the New Deal.[17]

Reflecting his overarching engagement with discussions of evolution, Ward critiqued Herbert Spencer and Spencer's theories of laissez-faire and survival of the fittest which were popular in socio-economic thought in the United States after the American Civil War. Ward positioned himself in opposition to Spencer and the American political scientist William Graham Sumner, an advocate for Spencer's ideas, who had promoted the principles of laissez-faire. The historian Henry Steele Commager argued that Ward "trained his heaviest guns" on "the superstitions that still held domain over the mid of his generation", of which "laissez-faire was the most stupefying"[18]

Women's equality edit

Ward advocated for equal rights for women, at times drawing on metaphors and analogies from his interest in the study of the natural world to support his arguments.[19] He gave a speech on the topic to the Fourteenth Dinner of the Six O’clock Club in Washington on April 26, 1888, at Willard’s Hotel.[20] Despite Ward's interest in the topic of equal rights for women, Clifford H. Scott summarised that "practically all the suffragists ignored" Ward,[21].

Personal life edit

Early life edit

Most, if not all of what is known about Ward's early life comes from the definitive biography, Lester F. Ward: A Personal Sketch,[22] written by Emily Palmer Cape in 1922. Lester Frank Ward was born in Joliet, Illinois. He was the youngest of 10 children born to Justus Ward and his wife Silence Rolph Ward. Justus Ward (d. 1858) was of New England colonial descent and farmed to earn a living. Silence Ward was the daughter of a clergyman; she was educated and fond of literature.[22]

When Ward was one year old, the family moved closer to Chicago, to Cass, now known as Downers Grove, Illinois about twenty-three miles from Lake Michigan. The family then moved to a homestead in nearby St. Charles, Illinois where Ward's father built a saw mill business making railroad ties.[22]

Ward first attended a formal school at St. Charles, Kane County, Illinois, in 1850 when he was nine years old. He was known as Frank Ward to his classmates and friends and showed a great enthusiasm for books and learning, liberally supplementing his education with outside reading.[22]

Four years after Ward started attending school, his parents, along with Lester and an older brother, Erastus, traveled to Iowa in a covered wagon for a new life on the frontier. Four years later, in 1858, Justus Ward unexpectedly died, and the boys returned the family to the old homestead they still owned in St. Charles. Ward's estranged mother, who lived two miles away with Ward's sister, disapproved of the move, and wanted the boys to stay in Iowa to continue their father's work.[22]

The two brothers lived together for a short time in the old family homestead they dubbed "Bachelor's Hall," doing farm work to earn a living, and encouraged each other to pursue an education and abandon their father's life of physical labor.[22]

In late 1858 the two brothers moved to Pennsylvania at the invitation of Lester Frank's oldest brother Cyrenus (9 years Lester Frank's senior), who was starting a business making wagon wheel hubs and needed workers. The brothers saw this as an opportunity to move closer to civilization and to eventually attend college.[22]

The business failed, however, and Lester Frank, who still didn't have the money to attend college, found a job teaching in a small country school; in the summer months he worked as a farm laborer. He finally saved enough money to attend college and enrolled in the Susquehanna Collegiate Institute in 1860. While he was at first self-conscious about his spotty formal education and self learning, he soon found that his knowledge compared favorably to his classmates', and he was rapidly promoted.[22]

Marriage edit

While attending the Susquehanna Collegiate Institute, Ward met Elizabeth "Lizzie" Carolyn Vought and fell deeply in love. They married on August 13, 1862. Shortly afterward, he enlisted in the Union Army and was sent to the Civil War front. After the war he successfully petitioned for work with the federal government in Washington, DC, where the couple moved.

Lizzie assisted him in editing a newsletter called The Iconoclast, dedicated to free thinking and critiquing organized religion. She gave birth to a son, but the child died when he was less than a year old. Lizzie died in 1872.[23] Rosamond Asenath Simons was married to Lester Frank Ward as his second wife in the year 1873.[22]

Ward's diaries, writings, and photographs edit

All but the first of his voluminous diaries were reportedly destroyed by his wife after his death. Ward's first journal, Young Ward's Diary: A Human and Eager Record of the Years Between 1860 and 1870..., remains under copyright. A collection of Ward's writings and photographs is maintained by the Special Collections Research Center of the George Washington University. The collection includes articles, diaries, correspondence, and a scrapbook. GWU's Special Collections Research Center is located in the Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library.[24]

Literature edit

  • Becker, Ernest (1975). Escape From Evil. New York / London: Free Press / Collier MacMillan. OCLC 780436838 (all editions).[25]
  • John Chynoweth Burnham (1956). Lester Frank Ward in American thought. Annals of American sociology. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press. ISBN 978-0742522176.
  • Samuel Chugerman (1939). Lester F. Ward, the American Aristotle: A Summary and Interpretation of His Sociology. Literary Licensing, LLC. ISBN 978-1-258-10598-3.[26][27]
  • Chriss, James J. (2006). "The Place of Lester Ward among the Sociological Classics". Journal of Classical Sociology. 6 (1): 5–21. doi:10.1177/1468795X06061282. S2CID 145704932.
  • Commager, Henry Steele (1950). "Lester Ward and the Science of Society". The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-00046-7.
  • Commager, Henry Steele, ed. (1967). Lester Ward and the Welfare State. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. OCLC 906058006 (all editions).
  • Coser, Lewis. A History of Sociological Analysis. New York : Basic Books.
  • Dahms, Harry F. – 'Lester F. Ward'
  • Finlay, Barbara. "Lester Frank Ward as a Sociologist Of Gender: A New Look at His Sociological Work." Gender & Society, Vol. 13, No. 2, 251–265 (1999)[28]
  • Gossett, Thomas F. (1963) – Race: The History of an Idea in America.[29]
  • Harp, Gillis J. Positivist Republic, Ch. 5 "Lester F. Ward: Positivist Whig" Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1920
  • Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought, Chapter 4, (original 1944, 1955. reprint Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). Social Darwinism in American Thought
  • Largey, Gale. Lester Ward: A Global Sociologist [1]
  • Mers, Adelheid. Fusion [2]
  • Perlstadt, Harry. Applied Sociology as Translational Research: A One Hundred Fifty Year Voyage [3]
  • Rafferty, Edward C. Apostle of Human Progress. Lester Frank Ward and American Political Thought, 1841/1913. https://books.google.com/books?id=4Q_5F1gu-mMC
  • Ravitch, Diane. Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. Simon & Schuster. "Chapter one: The Educational Ladder" https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/ravitch-back.html
  • Ross, John R. Man over Nature: the origins of the conservation movement https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/view/2348/2307
  • Ross, Dorthy. The Origins of American Social Science. Cambridge University Press https://books.google.com/books?id=rg4blh6xmhIC&pg=PA85
  • Seidelman, Raymond and Harpham, Edward J. Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884–1984. p. 26 https://books.google.com/books?id=09-ZDrzUz-gC
  • Wood, Clement. The Sociology Of Lester F Ward https://archive.org/details/sociologyofleste033176mbp

Selected works edit

Linked here are facsimiles of original editions, which also include links to JSTOR conversions (where available), along with several alternate formats.

For modernized copies in pdf format, see those under external links below, which were photocopied and proofread by Ralf Schreyer and are the best quality you can find on the internet.

1880–1889 edit

1890–1899 edit

1900–1909 edit

1910–1919 edit

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ "WARD, Lester Frank". The International Who's Who in the World. 1912. p. 1067.
  2. ^ a b Dealey, James Quayle (1925). "Masters of Social Science: Lester Frank Ward". Social Forces. 4 (2): 257–272. doi:10.2307/3004574. ISSN 0037-7732.
  3. ^ Small, Albion W. (1916). "Fifty Years of Sociology in the United States (1865-1915)". American Journal of Sociology. 21 (6): 749–758. ISSN 0002-9602.
  4. ^ Martha Mitchell (1993). "Ward, Lester F.". Encyclopedia Brunoniana. Providence, RI: Brown University Library. He enlisted in the Union army in August 1862, only a few days after his secret marriage to Elisabeth Vought.
  5. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved April 10, 2024.
  6. ^ Ward, Lester. (1883). Dynamic Sociology: Or Applied Social Science as Based Upon Statistical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences.
  7. ^ Burnham, J. C. (1954). Lester Frank Ward as natural scientist. American Quarterly, 6(3), 260.
  8. ^ https://books.google.com/books?id=yUEKAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
  9. ^ Ward, L. F. (1916). Pure sociology: A treatise on the origin and spontaneous development of society. Macmillan Company.
  10. ^ Ward, L. F. (1916). Pure sociology: A treatise on the origin and spontaneous development of society. Macmillan Company.
  11. ^ Ward, L. F. (1916). Pure sociology: A treatise on the origin and spontaneous development of society. Macmillan Company.
  12. ^ Mike Hawkins (1997). Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge University Press. p. 13. ISBN 978-0521574341.
  13. ^ Ross, J. R. (1975). Man over nature: Origins of the conservation movement. American Studies, 16(1), 49-62.
  14. ^ Burnham, J. C. (1954). Lester Frank Ward as natural scientist. American Quarterly, 6(3), 265.
  15. ^ Lester Frank Ward, Forum XX, 1895, quoted in Henry Steel Commager's The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 210.
  16. ^ https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/4j03d0010.html
  17. ^ Steven L. Piott (2006). American Reformers, 1870–1920: Progressives in Word And Deed. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0742527638.
  18. ^ Commager, Henry Steel. (1950). The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (New Haven: Yale University Press).
  19. ^ Ward, Frank Lester. (1888) "Our Better Halves," https://gynocentrism.com/2015/05/15/our-better-halves-1888/
  20. ^ Ward, Frank Lester. (1888) "Our Better Halves," https://gynocentrism.com/2015/05/15/our-better-halves-1888/
  21. ^ Clifford H. Scott, "A Naturalistic Rationale For Women's Reform: Lester Frank Ward on the Evolution of Sexual Relations," Historian (1970) 33#1 pp. 54–67
  22. ^ a b c d e f g h i Cape, Emily Palmer (1922). Lester F. Ward: A Personal Sketch.
  23. ^ American Sociological Association. "American Sociological Association – Lester Ward". www2.asanet.org. Archived from the original on August 13, 2013. Retrieved August 23, 2013.
  24. ^ Guide to the Lester Frank Ward Papers, 1883–1919 Archived November 19, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, Special Collections Research Center, Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library, the George Washington University
  25. ^ Becker 1975: online available in Internet Archive.
  26. ^ Ross, Edward A. (1939). "Review of Lester F. Ward, The American Aristotle". American Sociological Review. 4 (6): 859–861. doi:10.2307/2083768. ISSN 0003-1224.
  27. ^ Guthrie, Elton F. (1939). "Review of Lester F. Ward, The American Aristotle". American Sociological Review. 4 (6): 861–862. doi:10.2307/2083769. ISSN 0003-1224.
  28. ^ Finlay 1999: abstract
  29. ^ Gossett : new edition 1997 in Google Books.
  30. ^ hdl:2027/mdp.39015086632505
  31. ^ Patten, Simon N. (1894). "The Failure of Biologic Sociology". The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 4: 63–91. ISSN 0002-7162.
  32. ^ "Pure Sociology: A Treatise Concerning the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society . Lester F. Ward". Journal of Political Economy. 11 (4): 655–656. 1903. doi:10.1086/251002. ISSN 0022-3808.

Further reading edit

Primary sources edit

  • Commager, Henry Steele, ed., Lester Frank Ward and the Welfare State (1967), major writings by Ward, and long introduction by Commager
  • Stern, Bernhard J. ed. Young Ward's Diary: A Human and Eager Record of the Years Between 1860 and 1870 as They Were Lived in the Vicinity of the Little Town of Towanda, Pennsylvania; in the Field as a Rank and File Soldier in the Union Army; and Later in the Nation's Capital, by Lester Ward Who became the First Great Sociologist This Country Produced (1935)

Secondary sources edit

  • Bannister, Robert. Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880–1940 (1987), pp. 13–31.
  • Burnham, John C. "Lester Frank Ward as Natural Scientist," American Quarterly 1954 6#3 pp. 259–265 in JSTOR
  • Chugerman, Samuel. Lester F. Ward, the American Aristotle: A Summary and Interpretation of His Sociology (Duke University Press, 1939)
  • Fine, Sidney. Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865–1901 (1956), pp. 252–288
  • Muccigrosso, Robert, ed. Research Guide to American Historical Biography (1988) 3:1570–1574
  • Nelson, Alvin F. "Lester Ward's Conception of the Nature of Science," Journal of the History of Ideas (1972) 33#4 pp. 633–638 in JSTOR
  • Piott, Steven L. American Reformers, 1870-1920: Progressives in Word and Deed (2006); examines 12 leading activists; see chapter 1 for Ward.
  • Scott, Clifford H. Lester Frank Ward (1976)

External links edit

Primary sources edit

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Lester Frank Ward.
 
Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Ward, Lester Frank".

Secondary sources edit

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