Week 6: “Human Ecology”

Robert Park was born in Harveyville, Pennsylvania while his father was serving in the Civil War. They later settled in Minnesota and his father became a prosperous grocer. Park entered the University of Michigan in 1882 and was particularly drawn to the philosophy courses of John Dewey. He acquired ideas of evolutionary naturalism from Dewey, coming to see society as set in the natural order, in a competitive arena, but also held together by cognitive and moral consensus.

Upon graduation he began a career as a newspaper reporter, moving from Minneapolis to Detroit, to Denver, to New York, and finally to Chicago. He wrote on the corruption of urban political machines, the immigrant areas of the city, crime, and other urban affairs. Journalism, particularly in Manhattan, satisfied his thirst for adventure and multifarious experience, but a persisting interest in the grand questions of life led him to return to academia to study philosophy at Harvard University in 1898. He subsequently grew interested in social thought and thus was impelled to move to Germany and the University of Berlin, which was then seen by many to be the intellectual center of Europe. While in Berlin, he came under the influence of Georg Simmel, then a Privatdozent lecturing in sociology. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1904.

Park returned from Germany to Massachusetts in 1903 and became a teaching assistant at Harvard. Through a chance encounter with a missionary, however, he discovered the work of the Congo Reform Association, and soon accepted work as their secretary and chief publicity agent. Through his work lobbying Congress to take action on the state of brutality and exploitation in the Congo Free State, Park met Booker T. Washington, who in 1905 was at the height of his notoriety as an accommodationist spokesman for black causes among the political elites. He became Washington’s stenographer/ghostwriter, counselor, and press agent for the next seven years, working mainly at the Tuskegee Institute in Macon, Georgia, with regular visits to New England and occasional tours to Europe with Washington. This migratory lifestyle did not suit his family, however, and he decided to return to academic life, at the invitation of W. I. Thomas, then a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.