"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.

Case 8: Pedants and Potentates

On February 18,1929, Acting President Woodward sent letters to Cole and Ellsworth Faris (chairman of the joint department), establishing a separate Department of Anthropology under Cole's chairmanship. By this time, Cole and Sapir were both important members of an emerging national network of elite academicians and foundation bureaucrats who helped to define the research priorities of the social sciences - "pedants and potentates" as Robert Redfield called them when he first attended the Social Science Research Council Hanover Conference in 1930. Within six weeks of the Department's founding, the three anthropologists had sent off to the Rockefeller Foundation a five-year plan for anthropological research, which was quickly funded to the tune of $75,000.

In addition to various archaeological and linguistic projects in the United States, the proposal included work in northwestern Mexico - provoking a brief flurry of concern among the University of California anthropologists, who considered this an encroachment on "their" ethnographic preserve. The plan extended beyond Mexico to include a substantial sum for research which Sapir was supervising in Africa - in connection with which Mark Hanna Watkins was later to become the first black Ph.D. in anthropology. For a brief moment before the economic roof fell in, Chicago students were involved in research all over the world, and the opportunities for their subsequent academic employment seemed very bright indeed.

Cole's fund-raising activities were not limited to the "potentates' of the eastern seaboard. He was also active locally among a group of well-heeled members of a "Citizen's Committee on Anthropology" which he organized in 1927. Within several years, one of them, Mrs. Adolph Lichtstem, established a $300,000 endowment for ethnological research. Another, the retired grain-broker Dr. Frank Logan, was on the verge of giving an amount sufficient to build a separate anthropology building next to the Oriental Institute when he was "hit by the whirlwind" of a crashing stock market, forcing the Department to retreat into space in the newly opened Social Science Research Building.

Cole's plans for a separate building had been justified in terms of a threepart conception of the role of anthropology: the reconstruction of the "long struggle man has waged in building up our present civilization"; the "study of existing cultures" in the context of changing sources of American immigration; and the study of "present day problems relating to human heredity, race crossing and adaption of immigrants to American conditions." However, his hopes for a permanent appointment for Wilton M. Krogman as physical anthropologist were forestalled by the onset of the depression, and by the more serious personnel problem resulting from Sapir s increasing dissatisfaction with the teaching load he was forced to carry. When Sapir received a virtually unmatchable offer from Yale, the University did all it could to speak to his concerns, anticipating that as a Jew he would "find life difficult in the Ivy League." However, the two appointments made to fill his place until he might returnone (his student Harry Hoijer) as linguist and the other (A. R. RadcliffeBrown) as departmental "star" - turned out to be more than temporary. The latter, particularly, was to have a strong influence on the Department, turning it back toward "social science" in the aftermath of its separation from sociology.

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