Edward Alsworth Ross

He was born in Virden, Illinois. His father was a farmer. He attended Coe College and graduated in 1887. After two years as an instructor at a business school, the Fort Dodge Commercial Institute, he went to Germany for graduate study at the University of Berlin. He returned to the U.S., and in 1891 he received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in political economy under Richard T. Ely,[6][4] with minors in philosophy and ethics.[7]

Ross was a professor at Indiana University (1891–1892), secretary of the American Economic Association (1892), professor at Cornell University (1892–1893), and professor at Stanford University (1893–1900).[8] He was then a professor at University of Nebraska (1900–1904) and University of Wisconsin-Madison (1905–1937).

In the field of economics, he made contributions to the study of taxation, debt management, value theory, uncertainty, and location theory.[4]

In Stanford's "first academic freedom controversy",[9] Ross was fired from Stanford because of his political views on eugenics.[10][11] He objected to Chinese and Japanese immigrant labor (on both economic and racial grounds: he was an early supporter of the "race suicide" doctrine and expressed his wish to restrict entry of other races in strong and crude language in public speeches[12]) and Japanese immigration altogether. In the speech that was the catalyst for his potential firing and ultimate resignation, he was quoted as declaring, "And should the worst come to the worst it would be better for us if we were to turn our guns upon every vessel bringing Japanese to our shores rather than to permit them to land."[13] In response, Jane Stanford called for his resignation.[14]

In Ross' public statement as to his resignation, he wrote that his friend David Starr Jordan had asked him to make the speech. Jordan managed to keep Ross from being fired, but Ross resigned shortly after.[15] The position was at odds with the university's founding family, the Stanfords, who had made their fortune in Western rail construction, a major employer of coolie laborers.

Ross had also made critical remarks about the railroad industry in his classes: "A railroad deal is a railroad steal." This was too much for Jane Stanford, Leland Stanford's widow, who was on the board of trustees of the university. Numerous professors at Stanford resigned after protests of his dismissal, sparking "a national debate... concerning the freedom of expression and control of universities by private interests."[8] The American Association of University Professors was founded largely in response to this incident.[16]

Ross left for the University of Nebraska, where he taught until 1905.[17] In 1906, he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he became Professor of Sociology, and eventually chairman of the department. He retired in 1937.[7]

His understanding of Americanization and assimilation bore a striking resemblance to that of another Wisconsin professor, Frederick Jackson Turner. Like Turner, Ross believed that American identity was forged in the crucible of the wilderness. The 1890 census's proclamation that the frontier had disappeared, then, posed a significant threat to America's ability to assimilate the mass of immigrants who were arriving from southern and eastern Europe. In 1897, just four years after Turner had presented his frontier thesis to the American Historical Association, Ross, then at Stanford, argued that the loss of the frontier destroyed the machinery of the melting pot process.[18]

In 1913, the State of Wisconsin passed its first sterilization law.[19] Ross, who lived in Wisconsin at the time, was a reserved proponent of sterilization and indicated his support for the measure.[19][20] He qualified his support by contrasting it with the greater harm of hanging a man and advocated its initial use "only to extreme cases, where the commitments and the record pile up an overwhelming case." Involuntary sterilization remained legal in Wisconsin until July 1978.

Ross visited Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He endorsed the revolution even as he acknowledged its bloody origins. He was subsequently a leading advocate of US recognition of the Soviet Union. He later served on the Dewey Commission, which cleared Leon Trotsky of the charges made against him by the Soviet government during the Moscow Trials.[21]

From 1900 to the 1920s, Ross supported the alcohol Prohibition movement as well as continuing to support eugenics and immigration restriction.[22] By 1930, he had moved away from those views, however.

In the 1930s, he was a supporter of the New Deal programs of President Franklin Roosevelt. In 1940, he became chairman of the national committee of the American Civil Liberties Union,[23] serving until 1950.[7]

He died in 1951.

• Honest Dollars. Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Co., 1896.
• Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order, The Macmillan Company, 1901 [Last reprint 2009 by Transaction Publishers; with a new introduction by Matthias Gross].
• Foundations of Sociology, The Macmillan Company, 1905.
• Sin and Society: An Analysis of Latter-Day Iniquity (with a letter from President Roosevelt), Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1907.
• Social Psychology: An Outline and Source Book, The Macmillan Company, 1908.
• Latter Day Sinners and Saints, B. W. Huebsch, 1910.
• The Changing Chinese: The Conflict of Oriental and Western Cultures in China, The Century Co., 1911.
• Changing America: Studies in Contemporary Society, The Century Co., 1912.
• The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People, The Century Co., 1914.
• South of Panama, The Century Co., 1915.
• Russia in Upheaval, The Century Co., 1918.
• What is America?, The Century Co., 1919.
• The Principles of Sociology, The Century Co., 1920.
• The Russian Bolshevik Revolution, The Century Co., 1921.
• The Social Trend, The Century Co., 1922.
• The Outlines of Sociology, The Century Co., 1923.
• The Russian Soviet Republic, The Century Co., 1923.
• The Social Revolution in Mexico, The Century Co., 1923.
• Changes in the Size of American Families in One Generation, University of Wisconsin Studies, 1924 [with R. E. Baber].
• Roads to Social Peace, The University of North Carolina Press, 1924.
• Civic Sociology: A Textbook in Social and Civic Problems for Young Americans, World Book Company, 1926 [1st Pub. 1925].
• Report on the Employment of Native Labor in Portuguese Africa, Abbott Press, 1925.
• Standing Room Only?, The Century Co., 1927.
• World Drift, The Century Co., 1928.
• Tests and Challenges in Sociology, The Century Co., 1931.
• Seventy Years of It: An Autobiography, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1936.
• La libertad en el Mundo Moderno, In: Letras (Lima), Vol. 2, Iss. 5, 1936. Doi: https://doi.org/10.30920/letras.2.5.3
• New-Age Sociology, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1940.

• American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky

• Gillin, John Lewis (1937). "The Personality of Edward Alsworth Ross". American Journal of Sociology. 42 (4): 534–542. doi:10.1086/217493. S2CID 144305068.
• Gross, Matthias (2002). "When Ecology and Sociology Meet: The Contributions of Edward A. Ross". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. 38 (1): 27–42. doi:10.1002/jhbs.1095. PMID 11835219.
• Gross, Matthias (2003). "Sociologists of the Unexpected: Edward A. Ross and Georg Simmel on the Unintended Consequences of Modernity". The American Sociologist. 34 (4): 40–58. doi:10.1007/s12108-003-1015-9. S2CID 145421989.
• Kolb, William L. (1948). "The Sociological Theories of Edward Alsworth Ross". In Barnes, Harry Elmer (ed.). An Introduction to the History of Sociology. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226037233.
• Lovett, Laura (2007). "The Political Economy of Sex: The Construction of Race Suicide". Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807868102.
• McMahon, Sean H. (1998). "Professional Purpose and Academic Legitimacy: Ross's Social Control and the Founding of American Sociology". The American Sociologist. 29 (3): 9–25. doi:10.1007/s12108-998-1002-2. S2CID 144365444.
• Odum, Howard W. (1951). "Edward Alsworth Ross: 1866–1951". Social Forces. 30 (1): 126–127. doi:10.1093/sf/30.1.126.
• Page, Charles Hunt (1940). Class and American Sociology: from Ward to Ross. The Dial Press.
• Spellman, William E. (1979). "The Economics of Edward Alsworth Ross". American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 38 (2): 129–140. doi:10.1111/j.1536-7150.1979.tb02871.x. JSTOR 3486894.

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Edward Alsworth Ross

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• Works by Edward Alsworth Ross at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works by Edward Alsworth Ross at Project Gutenberg
• Works by E. A. Ross, at JSTOR
• Edward Alsworth Ross at Find a Grave