LETTERS
Interested
in "Consuming"
What
a surprise when I showed my August/01 copy of the magazine to
my husband, thinking he might be interested in the advertising
article ("Consuming Interests")! For many years he was a well-known
illustrator in Chicago, and for the last 25 years or so he has
had a successful career executing fine art for serious collectors
(among his commissions are two paintings for George Bush and one
for Ronald Reagan-one of Bush's and the Reagan painting hang in
their respective libraries).
Looking
through the article, he discovered two of his illustrations, the
woman and the man beside a sink/dishwasher. Needless to say, his
current work is of a different nature and quality. Thank you for
making my day!
Marjorie
Bivins Hopper, AB'43, AM'62
Sarasota, Florida
Congratulations
on your article on W. Lloyd Warner and his Social Research, Inc.
staff. I was a grad student researcher under Lloyd, who one day
announced to our advanced Cultural Anthropology class that he'd
lost the first set of vitae turned in by those interested in working
with him on the Sears research and needed another set to select
someone to do the study. I was selected, perhaps because I had
carried Volume 2 of his Yankee City series around the world on
Army Air Force assignments and had had it leather bound in Agra,
India. Another factor may have been my working at Carl R. Rogers's
U of C Counseling Center, where we emphasized Rogerian nondirective
techniques.
Burleigh
(pronounced "Bully" in Burleigh's Texas drawl) supervised the
project. After turning in the report, I asked Lloyd if I could
anonomize the findings, add appropriate scholarly references,
and submit it as a master's thesis. Lloyd helped me with the additional
material and also served as my thesis advisor. Later, he was my
dissertation advisor on a Teachers Union study, which became a
part of the Industrial Relations Center's white-collar unionism
series and was published in book form.
As
a mentor, Lloyd was outstanding. After passing my Ph.D. prelims,
I was offered a position with a major Chicago psychological firm
at a starting salary larger than the starting rate for U of C
instructors. Lloyd said, "Bob, I have seen so many Ph.D. candidates
get to where you are and fail to complete their degree work for
one reason or another that I'm advising you to continue starving
under the G.I. Bill and finish up here. I'm sure the Chicago firm
will do all they can to help you on your dissertation, but if
a Los Angeles client needs your services, they will have to send
you out there, dissertation or no dissertation." I took his advice.
After four years at Chicago and 35 years of B-school teaching
as a full professor in two major universities, my feeling is that
Lloyd Warner was truly one of the great ones.
Robert
F. Pearse, AM'47, PhD'50
Rochester, New York
John
Easton's "Consuming Interests" includes a quote from Leo J. Shapiro,
AB'42, PhD'56, a contemporary of many involved in Social Research,
Inc., as well as a business competitor of this influential market
research firm. Not mentioned is his early advocacy of punch-card
voting, much in the news since the 2000 Presidential elections.
I
remember Leo arguing in the early '50s that voting needed to require
some positive action by the voter-something more vigorous than
merely marking a paper ballot. His theoretical conception was
sound social science of the kind exercised by SRI; the failure
of punch-card voting was one of execution. States simply weren't
willing to spend enough money to buy equipment necessary to use
this delicate device, the "hollerith" (or by World War II, "IBM")
card effectively.
Those
of us old enough to have worked with punch cards well remember
why an organization's "computer room" was air-conditioned year-round
no matter how hot or cold the rest of the work space. The first
lesson in using the '50s computer was: Handle punch cards gently.
Leo did not anticipate the rough handling these cards would receive
from voters, poll workers, and the weather in various climates,
in elections occurring in all seasons. It's not surprising that
they failed to record voters' intentions correctly 5 to 10 percent
of the time, no matter where used-Illinois, Florida, and other
states.
True,
the punch-card ballot was "abstract," in that the voter could
not see for whom he had voted as with a paper ballot or voting
machine. It's also true that the punch card didn't give voters
a "rush" from the act of penetrating a thin piece of cardboard
with a metal "needle"-another flaw of execution. But one cannot
blame the punch-card system for the decline in voting participation
after 1950; the cause must be sought in other trends, e.g., rapid
job turnover that led citizens of most income levels to move around
the country too rapidly to engender loyalty to and interest in
local affairs and government.
The
recent report from the ad hoc Presidential Commission on Voting
Procedures did not, to my knowledge, include any social science
analysis of the personal and social meaning of the "vote." While
the proposed procedures may increase the count's accuracy, I predict
that we will continue to see a decline in the percentage of citizens
who actually vote, because the commission failed to ask the right
question, to which Leo Shapiro offered a constructive answer a
half-century ago: Why do people vote?
These
words are another way of praising the social science thinking
that flowed from Chicago in an ever-stronger stream after World
War I. A traditionalist at heart, I'm willing to give credit for
its genesis to John Dewey (who was at the University in the 1890s)
and our first president, William Rainy Harper, and his concern
for factual research. Easton praised Lloyd Warner for stimulating
and conducting much of the social research that led to SRI; some
others added to the total atmosphere responsible for SRI's success:
Ernest W. Burgess, PhD'13, and Charles Merriam, SB'22, JD'25,
in the '20s; Louis Wirth and Herbert Blumer, PhD'28, and William
F. Whyte, PhD'43, from the '30s to the '40s; plus many whose names
I've forgotten…all helped lay the ground work on which Warner
and his SRI colleagues built.
On
the other side of the transaction, an examination of any sphere
of human endeavor after about 1930-education, health care, law,
industrial relations and business management, social service-would
demonstrate the debt of mankind to the University of Chicago approach
to studying human problems.
Leonard
S. Stein, AM'49, PhD'62
Evanston, Illinois
©2001 The University
of Chicago® Magazine