Thomas, William Isaac 1863-1947

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THOMAS, William Isaac 1863-1947

PERSONAL: Born August 13, 1863 in Russell County, VA; died December 5, 1947, in Berkeley, CA; son of Thaddeus (a farmer and Methodist preacher) and Sarah (Price) Thomas; married Harriet Park, June 6, 1888 (divorced, 1934); married Dorothy Swaine (a sociologist), February 7, 1935. Education: University of Tennessee, B.A., 1884; studied in Germany, 1888-89; University of Chicago, Ph.D., 1896. Politics: Pacifist. Religion: Methodist.

CAREER: Sociologist. Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, professor, 1890-95; University of Chicago, professor, 1893-1918; Carnegie Corporation, New York, NY, researcher. Lecturer and visiting professor.

MEMBER: American Sociological Association (president, 1926).

WRITINGS:

On a Difference in the Metabolism of the Sexes, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1897.

The Relation of the Medicine-Man to the Origin of the Professional Occupations, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1903.

(With Charles Flint McClumpha) Minnesota Stories: A Collection of Twenty Stories of College Life, H. W. Wilson Co., (Minneapolis, MN), 1903.

Sex and Society; Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1907, reprinted, Arno Press (New York, NY), 1974.

Source Book for Social Origins; Ethnological Materials, Psychological Standpoint, Classified and Annotated Bibliographies for the Interpretation of Savage Society, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1909, 6th edition, R. G. Badger (Boston, MA), c.1920s.

(With H.S. Jennings, John B. Watson, Adolf Meyer) Suggestions of Modern Science Concerning Education, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1917.

(With Florian Znaniecki) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1918, reprinted, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1996.

(With Robert Ezra Park and Herbert Adolphus Miller) Old World Traits Transplanted, c. 1921, Patterson Smith (Montclair, NJ), 1971.

(With Dorothy Swaine Thomas) The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs, A. A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1928, reprinted, Johnson Reprint Corp. (New York, NY), 1970.

The Unadjusted Girl; with Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis, Little, Brown, and Company (Boston, MA), 1923, reprinted, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1967.

Primitive Behavior: an Introduction to the Social Sciences, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. (New York, NY), 1937.

Edmund Howell Volkart, editor, Social Behavior and Personality: Contributions of W. I. Thomas to Theory and Social Research, Social Science Research Council (New York, NY), 1951, reprinted, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1981.

Morris Janowitz, editor, W.I. Thomas on Social Organization and Social Personality: Selected Papers, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1966.

(With Siegwart Lindenberg, James Coleman, Stefan Nowak, and Florian Znaniecki) Approaches to Social Theory: Based on the W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki Memorial Conference on Social Theory, Russell Sage Foundation (New York, NY), 1986.

Contributor of articles to scholarly publications.

SIDELIGHTS: William Isaac Thomas was a primary contributor to the Chicago school of sociological thought, which is the basis of American sociology. He is acknowledged, along with Talcott Parsons and George Mead, as a founder of symbolic interactionism.

Thomas received his bachelor's degree in 1884 and his doctorate in 1896. He began teaching at the University of Chicago, his alma mater, and was awarded a full professorship there in 1910. He married Harriet Park in 1888 and had five children. Only two survived to adulthood.

Thomas traveled extensively throughout Europe during the years 1908 to 1919. During this time he collected much of the material that would later evolve into a five-volume work titled The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. In it Thomas and coauthor Florian Znaniecki examine how immigrants adjust to a new culture and what social factors affect the process. Thomas chose to study the Poles for his research because they were the largest—and thus, most visible—ethnic group on Chicago's South Side. They were also considered a social problem in Chicago; being the dedicated social reformer he was, Thomas thought he could kill two birds with one stone. It was while on a trip to Poland that he met Florian Znaniecki, the philosopher who turned out to be his most valuable informant and finally, his collaborator.

Thomas considered attitude the predisposition of an individual to act in relation to social values, rather than as a purely psychical state. This concept formed the basis of a social psychology. Thomas and Znaniecki emphasized the interdependence of fact-gathering and theory. This emphasis naturally led to Thomas's notion of the "definition of the situation," which means that human actors, faced with an identical situation, react differently based on how each individual interprets meanings through his or her filter of perceptual experience. Thomas applied this concept and related ideas to works such as The Unadjusted Girl and The Child in America.

While teaching at Chicago, Thomas was arrested for violating the Mann Act, which forbade transport of young women across state lines for 'immoral purposes.' He was caught in a hotel with the young wife of an army officer and, though the charges were eventually dropped, was dismissed from his post and never held a regular university position again. It was rumored that the scandal was more political than moral, since Thomas and Harriet were both involved with the pacifist movement during wartime, but the damage was done.

Thomas was a sociologist's sociologist. He made an immediate impact on the key figures of his era and, with the publication of The Polish Peasant, commanded respect and a powerful intellectual position. He was a champion of social change, with a critical yet sympathetic attitude. He frowned upon the concept of "Americanization" and acknowledged the positive contribution of ethnic identifications to both the individual and society as a whole. It is Thomas with whom American sociologists credit with converting sociology from a philosophical subject into a systematic research discipline.

Thomas died at the age of eighty-six.