One of the most influential of all Yalies lived exactly 100 hundred years before me: William Graham Sumner (1840-1910). He belonged to the half century-plus of American academics who asserted the importance of what they did by using all three of their names. Charles William Eliot, William Lyon Phelps, George Herbert Mead, G. Stanley Hall, Henry Seidel Canby: it’s gravy on the tongue. These men -- and with few exceptions (M. Carey Thomas, for instance) they were men -- were fighting to establish the seriousness of the American research university against the acknowledged leadership of the German universities.
Sumner taught social economy at Yale for 37 years, but he wasn’t a researcher in our terms: he was a propagandist, the Johnny Appleseed of Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism. His belief was that society is best served when the strong crush the weak. He adamantly opposed aid to the poor. He was also an Episcopal minister. He saw no contradiction.
His 1881 essay “Sociology” has this marvelous sentence:
It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed.
In other words, you can’t change society and, if you try to do so, you make it worse.
His belief, and the illogic on which it is based, still poison American public-policy thinking.
