From a tweet posted by @Undercoverhist, a.k.a. Beatrice Cherrier, I learned of the 2015 book by Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Dubois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (University of California Press). Cherrier provided a link to the review of the book written by Julian Go (January 11, 2016). Morris appears to have made a rather convincing case that Dubois’ priority in empirical sociological research relative to that of Albion Small at the University of Chicago was woefully ignored by his contemporaries and subsequent mainstream American sociology. It is a story of an African-American social scientist working on “The Negro Problem”, as it was then called, who was clearly excluded from the establishment club of American empirical sociology but whose work can now be seen to have been pioneering in many important respects.
The marginalization of the (black) Dubois by his (white) contemporaries in sociology caught my attention because I had recently spent some time pondering whether or not Dubois should be counted in a list of Harvard economics Ph.D.’s. On the one hand, his 1895 dissertation, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870”, was published as No. 1 in the Harvard Historical Series and on the other hand his division was listed as political science (under which economics and sociology both fall) rather than history and his special (examination) field was in “Constitutional Law and Economics”. In any event Dubois’ work soon crossed the ex post boundaries set between economics and sociology, so it now seems to me best to view his utterly multidisciplinary graduate training as a mere prelude to his later focus on sociological issues. Disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences were far more porous during Dubois’ student years. Race, gender and religious boundaries were pretty hard and fast.
One of my current projects is following the evolution of Karl Marx’s ideas in the economics curriculum in U.S. universities and colleges. Just this morning I stumbled upon the name of Emily Greene Balch while searching The Labadie Collection of the University of Michigan for possible leads. I soon found in a routine Google background check that Balch studied at Bryn Mawr College, then in Paris, Chicago and Berlin. She became the chairperson of the Wellesley College department of economics in 1913. It turns out that her pacifist politics played a decisive role in her dismissal from Wellesley College (and the end of her career in economics), though she did manage to receive a Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for her work in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Like Dubois she found a full and complete life is indeed possible outside of economics.
As in many matters in the history of economics, Bob Dimand has gotten somewhere before the rest of us, see “Emily Greene Balch, Political Economist” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, April 2011 Vol. 72, No. 2 for biographical detail. Dimand concludes:
“Balch’s story should be of particular interest to women economists as the first female economist to win a Nobel Prize, to social economists as an economist who was also a pioneering sociologist, to members of Economists for Peace and Security (EPS) as a Nobel Prize-winning pacifist economist, and more generally to anyone interested in academic freedom and in the moral responsibility of academics as public intellectuals to move beyond their immediate academic role to strive for world peace and social reform and against racism.…Emily Greene Balch was an active and useful political economist, and deserves a place in a history of political economy that extends beyond the history of economic theory.”
It is not the purpose of this posting to suggest that Emily Greene Balch’s pre-1919 work was to economics what Dubois’ appears to have been for American sociology. But it is worth thinking about whether the historical channeling of black Ph.D.’s to black colleges and women Ph.D.’s to women’s colleges might have some explanatory power in understanding the gradual reduction of historical and social/institutional elements in the training of Ph.D. economists, at least up through the 1950’s.
More recently, I have transcribed Emily Greene Balch’s outline for economics at Wellesley College in 1899.
Image Source: Cover of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (2008). Ulrich first coined the expression, seen on coffee-mugs and t-shirts everywhere, in her article “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735,” American Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 20-40.