Science: 100 Years After

If you want a war, nourish a doctrine.

Militarism is produced by a constant preoccupation with the chances of war.

It is no paradox at all to say that peace makes war and that war makes peace.

Political liberty inside of any country depends very largely upon its external relations.

These timely pronouncements were uttered by the late Professor William Graham Sumner of Yale, who was born in 1840 and died in 1910. He it was who coined the forgotten term “Forgotten Man” — though Sumner applied it not to the faceless proletariat but to the harried bourgeoisie, which always paid the bill.

A tough-minded 19th-Century giant, founding father of modern social science in the U. S., Sumner was a great and galvanizing teacher, who has become a Yale legend. Five years after his thunderous lectures ceased forever, a group of his one time students and disciples organized the William Graham Sumner Club. This year, the centenary of the great man’s birth, the club is honoring his memory by distributing salty Sumner sayings, which are a joy to every good Republican. More importantly, the anniversary was marked last week by the publication of a centennial edition of Sumner’s Folkways (Ginn; $4), a profoundly influential book. Wrote Yale’s William Lyon Phelps, a fervent Sumner admirer, in the introduction: “Folkways is a book that never was a best seller and has never stopped selling. It has a steady persistence, reminding us of the tide, that makes no sound and fury and that nothing can stop.”

Folkways is not so startling today as when it was published 33 years ago. Its basic theme — that the development of society is governed by hard evolutionary principles—is now taken for granted by every educated person. At that time this knowledge was still largely an academic possession. The first application of Darwinian theory to human customs and institutions had been made by Huxley. From Huxley, Sumner went on, demolishing one cherished faith after another, with what he called “shovelfuls of facts.”

Sumner started his professional life as an Episcopal clergyman. But nine years after his graduation from Yale he went back there as professor of political and social science, started compiling a great mass of anthropological data which comprises the bulk of Folkways. In it he covered the origin and evolution of marriage and family, religion, government, abortion, infanticide, social codes, crime & punishment, slavery, patriotism and chauvinism, labor, wealth and 1,001 other facets of human society. Many surviving mores (a term he himself brought into common scientific usage) were irrational, often harmful, and he said so savagely.

Sumner was always less irritated by taboos, rituals and fetishes of primitives than by those of civilization. At Yale he regularly raised hell in faculty meetings. Once, when President Arthur Twining Hadley offered a mild difference of opinion, Sumner barked: “But it’s the truth!” “That is possible,” said Hadley, “but it is not always necessary to tell the truth butt-end first.” Said Sumner: “I always tell the truth butt-end first.”

The notes for Sumner’s most comprehensive work, The Science of Society, were unfinished when he died. (He collapsed in Manhattan where, shaky and scant of breath, he had indomitably proceeded to a scientific meeting.) The Science of Society was completed by Sumner’s disciple and colleague, Albert Galloway Keller, now a Yale patriarch himself. Sumner left Keller 52 huge drawers and boxes crammed with 156,000 pages of notes. Sumner had his own filing system, using red cards for references to be consulted immediately, green for his own comments. All bore his unique abbreviations, a swastika for “superstition,” two dice for “luck.”

Sumner never tried to cajole, amuse or flatter his huge lecture classes, and he never talked down to them. He used to come crashing into the lecture hall like a gladiator into an arena. On the day of the Great Blizzard of ’88, he stamped in wearing leather boots. For him, rubber boots connoted pussyfooting. “Gentlemen,” he said once, “if Communism ever gets control of this country, you be sure and get on the Committee.”

“Gentlemen,” he used to admonish departing seniors, “get capital.”