Cattell, James McKeen

(b. Easton, Pennsylvania, 25 May 1860; d. Lancaster, Pennsylvania,20 January 1944),

psychology, scientific publishing.

Cattell was the first person in the world to have the title “professor of psychology” (University of Pennsylvania, 1888). After being asked to leave Johns Hopkins University in 1883 (his colleagues regarded him as a nuisance), he went to Leipzig, where he studied with Wilhelm Wundt, whose first laboratory assistanthe was. He received his doctorate in 1886. Part of the next two years was spent studying at Gallon’s anthropometric laboratory in London. In 1891 Cattell left Pennsylvania for Columbia University, where he remained until 1917, when his pacifist views resulted in his expulsion—one of the more spectacular academic freedom cases of the period.

Cattell’s psychological work shows the influence of his two masters. Like Wundt he was interested in experimental studies of human behavior; like Galton he was interested in statistical studies, of scientists in Cattell’s case. Cattell and his students (e.g., E. L. Thorndike, R. S. Woodworth) greatly influenced American psychology in its bias toward experimentation and quantification.

Cattell’s principal importance, however, is as a great scientific publisher and editor and as a powerful force in the development of the scientific and intellectual community. From 1895 until his death Cattell owned and edited Science. With J. M. Baldwin he founded Psychological Review in 1894 and continued as coeditor until 1903. Cattell took over Popular Science Monthly in 1900, relinquishing his editorship in 1915; he was not able to arrest the periodical’s decline, however. To supplant Popular Science Monthly, in 1915 he founded Scientific Monthly, which he edited until his death. In the same year he founded another journal, School and Society, which remained under his aegis for the rest of his life. With the initial support of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Cattell produced the first edition of American Men of Science in 1906 and edited all editions through the sixth (1938). Two editions of a related directory, Leaders in Education, appeared in 1932 and 1940. To handle all these publications he founded the Science Press of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1923. At a time when founding and maintaining scientific journals was quite risky, Cattell’s successful entrepreneurship earned him much gratitude from the scientific community.

Related to Cattell’s editorial work was his role as a would-be reformer of the American intellectual scene. In both his writings and his conduct Cattell upheld the rights of professors against deans and university presidents; he was instrumental in the founding of the American Association of University Professors in 1915. Selecting the American Association for the Advancement of Science as his chosen instrument for the reorganization of the scientific community, Cattell made Science its official organ in 1900 and later arranged for title to the periodical to pass to the Association on his death. In his scheme of things, the Association was to be the “House of Commons” of science, with representatives of each professional society and other organizations. The National Academy was to be an increasingly powerless “House of Lords.” His statistical analyses in American Men of Science and his attempt to “star” the leading scientists in the directory were used to buttress his position.

These compilations of statistical data on scientists are often all that later scholars have to fall back on. His attempts to determine scholarly productivity by having panels of scientists vote on comparative merits of investigators in particular fields are summed up by Stephen Visher in Scientists Starred (Baltimore, 1947). In general Cattell was somewhat more cautious than Visher in using the starred scientists, but both display a fair degree of gullibility. Cattell’s findings (and those of Visher) generated a good many myths that required correction in the development of national science policy after World War II —for example, small colleges are more productive of scientists than universities.

Cattell was a conscious opponent of George Ellery Hale’s program for revitalizing the National Academy of Sciences and making it the leader of the scientific community. After World War I, when Hale’s views prevailed, Cattell’s influence waned outside the A. A. A.S. In 1921 he founded the Psychological Corporation and Science Service, the former to gives cientists an opportunity to reap the benefits of their discoveries, the latter to communicate news of science to the lay public.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cattel’s personal papers are in the Library of Congress. The collection is discussed in Grover C. Batts, “The James McKeen Cattell Papers,” in Library of Congress, Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions, 17 (1960), 170–174, and is described in greater detail in the published register of the collection, James Mc Keen Cattell, a Register of His Papers in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., 1962).

No good bibliography of Cattell’s writings exists, but the most useful is the one appended to Pillsbury’s memoir (see below). Although admittedly selective, it is reasonably good for his psychological research but rather skimpy for Cattell as a man of scientific affairs. After Cattell’s death, A. T. Poffenberger edited a splendid collection of Cattelliana, James McKeen Cattell, Man of Science, 1860–1944, 2 vols.(Lancaster, Pa., 1947), which contains much useful bibliographic information. The Cattell papers in the Library of Congress have files of his papers and speeches, including unpublished items. Simply by browsing through Science and other publications associated with Cattell one can turn up other writings, some quite consequential.

The best brief biographical account is W. B. Pillsbury, “Biographical Memoir of James McKeen Cattell, 1860–1944” in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 25 (1949), 1–16. More ambitious but less reliable on some details is R. S. Woodworth, “James McKeen Cattell, 1860–1944,” in Psychological Review, 51 (1944), 201–209, repr. in Poffenberger, op. cit., I, 1–12. A memorial issue of Science contains interesting reminiscences and appreciations: 99 (1944), 151–165. For contemporary stimates of Cattell as a psychologist, see The Psychological Researchesof James McKeen Cattell: A Review by Some of His Students, no. 30 of Archives of Psychology (New York, 1914); and E. G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York, 1929), pp. 519–528. A discussion of the Cattell-Hale relationship is in Nathan Reingold, “National Aspirations and Local Purposes,” in Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, 71 (1969), 235–246.

Nathan Reingold