Given earlier discussions on this list about academic freedom and the ties  
to Econ at Wisconsin, I thought some members of this list might be  
interested in this bio from the American National Biography Online (see  
end of message for a web site on this excellent resource). 
 
Comments welcome. 
 
Humberto Barreto 
 
 
 
American National Biography Online       
     
 
 Ross, Edward Alsworth (12 Dec. 1866-22 July 1951),  sociologist 
and writer, was born in Virden, Illinois, the son of William 
Carpenter Ross, a farmer, and Rachel Alsworth, a schoolteacher. 
Orphaned by his mother's and father's deaths (1874 and 1876, 
respectively), Ross was sheltered in turn by three Iowa farm 
families. Of the latter, Ross regarded Mary Beach as his foster 
mother. Alexander Campbell, Ross's lawyer guardian, shepherded 
his inheritance, thereby providing ample funds for his schooling.   
 
 Completing the A.B. at Coe College (1886), Ross studied for 
a year at the University of Berlin and traveled in France and 
England (1888-1889). In 1890 he began graduate work majoring 
in economics at Johns Hopkins, where his mentors included Richard 
T. Ely and Woodrow Wilson. With minors in philosophy and ethics, 
Ross earned the Ph.D. (1891). His doctoral dissertation on the 
public debt was published as Sinking Funds by the American Economic 
Association (1892).   
 
 Also in 1892 Ross married Rosamond Simons, niece of sociologist 
Lester Frank Ward. Ross looked to Ward as a mentor, observing, 
"to receive the outpourings of his encyclopedic mind was equivalent 
to a post-doctoral course." Rosamond Ross was an artist and homemaker 
who devoted herself to her husband and their three children.   
 
 Ross rose rapidly in academia, accepting a succession of attractive 
university posts: Indiana (1891-1892), Cornell (1892-1893), and 
Stanford (1893-1900). He was elected secretary of the American 
Economic Association in 1892. A demanding instructor, he assigned 
to his students challenging readings such as Herbert Spencer's 
Principles of Sociology and Lester Frank Ward's Dynamic Sociology. 
Beyond the classroom, Ross enjoyed giving robust public lectures 
and Chautauqua-style extension courses for adults. He wrote for 
popular magazines such as Atlantic Monthly and Century, as well 
as for scholarly journals, and he became known for his punchy, 
attention-grabbing literary style, the cream of which enlivens 
his Capsules of Social Wisdom (1948).   
 
 Ross's penchant for spirited free speaking erupted in a fin 
de siecle cataclysm at Stanford University. His increasingly 
progressive views, free silver advocacy, and general outspokenness 
collided with Jane Lathrop Stanford, the university's conservative 
benefactor and powerful guiding hand. Stanford president David 
Starr Jordan failed to mollify Stanford or curb Ross. Jordan 
initially vacillated but later capitulated to Stanford's demand 
that Ross be terminated and curtly dismissed him at year's end 
(1900). George Elliott Howard, a respected Stanford professor, 
was then brutally forced by Jordan to resign for having lectured 
Stanford students on the unfairness of firing Ross. Nearly a 
half-dozen Stanford faculty resignations ensued to protest the 
Ross and Howard dismissals, igniting national debate about freedom 
of expression versus the control of universities by business 
interests. Ross was exonerated by an investigating committee 
of the American Economic Association (1901). From this incident 
grew the organized campaign to secure tenured protection for 
American academics.   
 
 The collapse of sociology at Stanford was exploited by the University 
of Nebraska, whose populist faction obtained Ross's services 
as professor of sociology in 1901 and in 1904 created a professorship 
for Howard. The collegial efforts of Ross, Howard, and a young 
law professor, Roscoe Pound, briefly made Nebraska a sociological 
powerhouse. Directly influenced by Ross, Pound devised and promulgated 
"sociological jurisprudence," the assumption that law is a living 
body of practices rather than a fixed set of rules derived from 
unchanging premises, a perspective that dominated American legal 
thinking during much of the twentieth century.   
 
 Ross accomplished his most important intellectual work while 
at Nebraska. He published a revised series of articles as Social 
Control (1901), in which he identified the collective factors 
that promote societal stability, and he wrote a comprehensive, 
systematic theory of society, Foundations of Sociology (1905). 
Before leaving Nebraska, he finished the manuscript for Social 
Psychology (1908), in which he extended the ideas of French sociologist 
Gabriel Tarde. And, meeting informally around his desk, Ross, 
Howard, and Pound established the topic outline for what became 
Ross's Principles of Sociology (1920).   
 
 In 1906 Ross accepted an attractive offer from the University 
of Wisconsin to join its economics department under the reins 
of his former teacher, Richard T. Ely. He was appointed professor 
of sociology and, as the only sociologist, developed course offerings 
along his own lines. Selected to guide a separately formed Department 
of Sociology and Anthropology in 1929, Ross chaired the Wisconsin 
department from 1929 to 1937 and was further honored with election 
to professor emeritus in 1937.   
 
 The progressive political element in Wisconsin suited Ross well, 
stimulating his pen and public appearances. His popular essay 
on the evils of irresponsible financial greed, Sin and Society 
(1907), garnered public endorsement from President Theodore Roosevelt 
(1858-1919), who noted, "With almost all that you write I am 
in full and hearty sympathy." Ross thus proudly joined a cadre 
of popular reform-oriented authors, including William Allen White 
and Upton Sinclair.   
 
 Ross was twice elected to the presidency of the American Sociological 
Society (1914, 1915). As president, he sponsored ASS sessions 
on freedom of expression and appointed his friend Roscoe Pound, 
then at the Harvard Law School, to represent the ASS on an interdisciplinary 
committee that became the mechanism for founding the American 
Association of University Professors. Believing that sociology 
should be an active and socially responsible discipline, Ross 
later counseled his fellow ASS members, "There may come a time 
in the career of every sociologist when it is his solemn duty to raise hell."   
 
 Ross was adventuresome, a well-seasoned traveler, and a world 
student. He revisited Europe during his first sabbatical opportunity 
for independent studies at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris 
and at the British Museum in London (1898-1899). Subsequent, 
extended globe-trotting included China and Japan (1910), western 
South America (1913-1914), Russia (1917), Mexico (1922), Angola, 
Mozambique, and South Africa (1924), India (1924-1925), Europe 
and the Soviet Union (1934), a round-the-world cruise as education 
director of the Floating University (1928-1929), and a medically 
advised rest in Tahiti (1932). His travels unearthed empirical 
fodder for numerous articles and travel books whose royalties, 
in turn, funded further treks. Popular works in this genre included 
The Changing Chinese (1911), South of Panama (1915), Russia in 
Upheaval (1918), The Russian Bolshevik Revolution (1921), The 
Social Revolution in Mexico (1923), and The Russian Soviet Republic (1923).   
 
 Ross's Tahitian idylls ended with the unexpected news of his 
wife's death in the United States in 1932. A reflective Ross 
wrote his autobiography in 1936, eschewing earlier views about 
racial superiority with which he had become associated. He also 
revealed his gradual and complete disillusionment with religion. 
He married Helen Forbes, a well-known social worker, in 1940. 
They had no children. As capstone to his long crusade for freedom 
of expression, Ross served as national chair of the American 
Civil Liberties Union (1940-1950). He died at home in Madison, Wisconsin.   
 
 Ross was a tireless, enthusiastic advocate for professional 
sociology, and his work materially shaped the founding contours 
of that discipline at the turn of the century. His legacy today 
is the near-universal recognition of the right to freedom of 
expression by academics worldwide.      
  
   
 Bibliography  
 
 Letters from Ross are in the Edward A. Ross Papers and the Richard 
T. Ely Papers in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library; 
the Edward A. Ross Papers and the George Elliott Howard Papers 
in the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Library; the Roscoe Pound 
Papers in the Harvard University Law School Library; and the 
Ross Controversy Papers, the David Starr Jordan Papers, and the 
Jane Lathrop Stanford Papers in the Stanford University Library. 
See also "The Ward-Ross Correspondence, 1891-1912," American 
Sociological Review 3 (1938): 362-401; 11 (1946): 593-605, 734-48; 
12 (1947): 703-20; 13 (1948): 82-94; and 14 (1949): 88-119.   
 
 His autobiography is Seventy Years of It (1936). Accounts of 
his Nebraska work are found in Bruce Keith, "The Foundations 
of an American Discipline: Edward A. Ross at the University of 
Nebraska, 1901-1906," Mid-American Review of Sociology 13, no. 
2 (1988): 43-56, and Michael R. Hill, "Roscoe Pound and American 
Sociology" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1989). His 
work in Wisconsin is discussed in Julius Weinberg, Edward Alsworth 
Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism (1972). A bibliography 
of his writings is found in Joyce O. Hertzler, "Edward Alsworth 
Ross: Sociological Pioneer and Interpreter," American Sociological 
Review 16 (1951): 597-613. For additional insights, see Committee 
of Economists, Report of the Committee of Economists on the Dismissal 
of Professor Ross from Leland Stanford Junior University (1901); 
John L. Gillin, "The Personality of Edward Alsworth Ross," American 
Journal of Sociology 42 (1937): 534-42; William L. Kolb, "The 
Sociological Theories of Edward Alsworth Ross," in Harry Elmer 
Barnes, An Introduction to the History of Sociology (1948); and 
Roscoe C. Hinkle, Founding Theory of American Sociology 1881-1915 
(1980). An obituary is in the New York Times, 23 July 1951.    
  
 Michael R. Hill  
  
  
 
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   Citation: 
 Michael R. Hill. "Ross, Edward Alsworth";  
http://www.anb.org/articles/14/14-00522.html;  
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.  
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Humberto Barreto 
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