Schaefer, Fred (1904–1953)

Fred Schaefer was a founding member of the department of geography at the University of Iowa, remaining there until his death in 1953. Schaefer is revered as a pioneer of the “quantitative revolution” in geography, for providing the greatest philosophical impetus for a scientific geography, although he died before many of its subsequent adherents met him.

Schaefer was born in Berlin and was an undergraduate at the University of Berlin (1928–1931) and a statistician for the city. But as a member of the Social Democratic Party, he fled from Nazi Germany in 1931 to Britain and then to the United States in 1938. He worked at an American Friends Service Committee refugee camp in Iowa before he joined the University of Iowa. His radical politics led to a degree of harassment in the period from 1946 to 1952.

His fame rests on the 1953 publication, which appeared just after his death, of an article in the leading American geography journal, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, titled “Exceptionalism in Geography: A Methodological Examination.” The paper had an electrifying effect on the discipline. Schaeffer had written about the possibility of a theoretical scientific geography as early as 1943 and taught the works of the leading location theorists (e.g., Christaller, Loesch, Thünen, Hoover) as early as 1950.

That the manuscript was published is remarkable; he was helped by Harold McCarty, chair at Iowa and an early advocate of the quantitative revolution. This revolutionary document was at the same time a methodological and philosophical attack on the dominant paradigm of geography as “idiographic,” or as a synthetic, descriptive field, as laid out in Richard Hartshorne's Nature of Geography, and a call for a normal scientific approach to geography based on a search for geographic laws concerning spatial relations—a “nomothetic” approach. The article was denounced by Hartshorne and other defenders of traditional geography but became an article of faith for the younger generation of economic geographers (after 1955), who were determined to develop geography as a spatial science.