Park, Robert

Life and Career

Park was born in Pennsylvania but spent his formative years in the town of Red Wing, Minnesota, the fourth child of Hiram and Theodosia Park, a grocer and school-teacher, respectively. Park was not a studious child; he passed his days in play, characteristically crossing ethnic divides to befriend children from Red Wing's Swedish and Norwegian immigrant communities. Despite his poor academic showing, Park went on to the University of Minnesota and then transferred after a year to the University of Michigan, where he received a degree in philosophy in 1887, coming under the influence of John Dewey, who was at that point more a Hegelian than a pragmatist.

Park had been a reporter for the student newspaper at Michigan. Upon graduation he entered the newspaper business, working briefly for a short-lived paper affiliated with Dewey and then for various big-city commercial presses. In 1894, he married Clara Cahill, an artist and writer, and in 1898 the couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Park took an MA in philosophy from Harvard, studying with William James. Park took to heart James's critiques of dogmatic philosophies that have no practical bearing on human affairs, and was impressed by James's willingness to fold into philosophy the real-world experiences that people from all walks of life had shared with him. (For a reading of Park that places more emphasis than I do here on his pragmatist roots, see Joas 1993.)

Led in this way from philosophy to social science, Park became intent on studying social psychology and making it the basis for a doctoral dissertation on the press. He moved with his family to Germany, which remained, even at the turn of the century, a mecca for those wishing to learn how to approach the human sciences empirically. Simmel's courses in sociology at the University of Berlin held tremendous interest for Park, and left a permanent imprint on his thinking, but he wrote his dissertation under the direction of Wilhelm Windelband, a neo-Kantian philosopher and historian of science. On returning to the United States, however, Park found himself despairing of spending more time in ivory towers, and declined an offer from Albion Small, the chair of sociology at the University of Chicago, to teach there on a temporary basis. Instead, he took a job as press secretary for the Congo Reform Association, whose goal was to publicize the brutality of Belgian colonial rule. This was an odd job for Park to have taken, for, despite his desire to return to the “real world,” his days as a reporter had left him with serious misgivings about the motivations and consequences of social reform activity. His tenure at the association was predictably brief. In 1905, he was hired away by Washington. Traveling frequently between Tuskegee, Alabama, and his family's home in Massachusetts, and often accompanying Washington on fact-finding expeditions and publicity tours, Park became intimately acquainted with the problems faced by African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South, and cowrote with (or ghost authored for) the busy Washington numerous articles, tracts, and books.

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