Park, Robert E. (1864–1944)

Early Years

Park was born February 14, 1864, in rural Pennsylvania. His mother, Theodosia Warner, was a schoolteacher, and his father, Hiram Asa Park, fought as a soldier for the Union army. When the U.S. Civil War ended, the Parks moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, where Robert Park lived for the next 18 years. He did not excel in school, although he took an interest in the personal histories of his townspeople and studied the immigrant community of the family's household helper, Litza. Park graduated from high school in 1882 and left home against his father's wishes to begin college at the University of Minnesota. Hiram Park initially opposed the idea of Robert going to college but decided to finance his son's education after Robert passed all of his first-year courses. The elder Park even convinced Robert to enroll in the more reputable University of Michigan, where he studied under professors Calvin Thomas and John Dewey.

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in philology in 1887, Park turned down a position as a schoolteacher in Red Wing, Minnesota, and instead moved to Minneapolis in the hopes of landing a job as a reporter. Inspired by Goethe's Faust, Park wanted to see the world. He found work as a reporter and held positions in several metropolitan areas, including Detroit, Denver, and New York. At this time, Park continued to gain insight into the functioning of newspapers and made the acquaintance of Franklin Ford, a Wall Street reporter. Under Ford's guidance, Park came to believe that better reporting would revolutionize the progressive historical process and, in turn, would lead to the demise of depression and violence.

Ford and Park began planning an experimental newspaper, The Thought News, that would unite scholarship and journalism, but the newspaper was never published. While working on the project, Park met an artist named Clara Cahill, whom he married in 1894 and with whom he eventually had four children.

Park's interest in reporting led him to study philosophy at Harvard University. He wanted to describe the behavior of society in scientific language, which he considered to be precise and universal. After a year at Harvard, he went abroad to study at Friederich Wilhelm University in Germany, where he took his one and only formal class in sociology from Georg Simmel. Park later described Simmel as “the greatest of all sociologists.”

While in Berlin, Park also discovered a book on the logic of the social sciences written by Bogdan Kistiakowski, a student of Wilhelm Windelband. Park soon left Berlin to study under Windelband and eventually followed him to Heidelberg, where Windelband was chair of the philosophy department. Park wrote most of his dissertation, “Masse und Publikum” (Crowd and Public), in Heidelberg and presented it to the faculty there, but he did not finish it until he returned to Harvard in 1903.

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