Robert E. Park - Life

Life

Robert E. Park was born in Harveyville, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania on February 14, 1864. He grew up in Red Wing, Minnesota. Park attended the University of Michigan where he studied under John Dewey. Dewey introduced Park to Franklin Ford, a reporter, who would help shape Park’s career in the coming years.

After graduating in 1887, a concern for social issues, especially issues related to race in cities, led him to become a journalist. Franklin Ford and Park planned a newspaper, titled Thought News, which would register public opinion like business papers recorded changes in the stock market . The news paper was never published, but Park still pursued a career as a journalist. From 1887 through 1898 Park worked as a journalist in Detroit, Denver, New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis. This encounter with journalism influenced his later work in sociology.

After working as a journalist in various U.S. towns from 1887–1898 he studied psychology and philosophy while studying with another prominent pragmatist philosopher, William James. Park earned a MA at Harvard in 1899. After graduating, he went to Germany to study at Freiderich Wilhelm University. He studied philosophy and sociology in 1899–1900 with Georg Simmel in Berlin, spent a semester in Straßburg (1900), and took his PhD in Philosophy in 1903 at Heidelberg under Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) and Alfred Hettner (1859–1941) with a dissertation titled Masse und Publikum. Eine methodologische und soziologische Untersuchung (Crowd and Public: A methodological and sociological study). He returned to the United States in 1903, briefly becoming an assistant professor in philosophy at Harvard 1904-5

Park taught at Harvard, until Booker T. Washington invited him to the Tuskegee Institute to work on racial issues in the southern U.S. Park was a publicist for the Tuskegee Institute and later became a director of public relations. Over the next seven years, Park worked for Washington doing field research and taking courses. In 1910, Park traveled to Europe to compare U.S. poverty to European poverty. Shortly after the trip, Washington, with the help of Park, published The Man Farthest Down (1913).

After Tuskegee, Park joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1914, first as a lecturer (1914–1923) then as a full professor of sociology until his retirement in 1933. During his time at the University of Chicago, he continued to study and teach human ecology and race relations. After leaving the University of Chicago, Park moved to Nashville, Tennessee. He taught at Fisk University until is death in 1944, at age 79.

During his lifetime Park became a well-known figure both within and outside the academic world. At various times from 1925 he was president of the American Sociological Association and of the Chicago Urban League, and was a member of the Social Science Research Council.