Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

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missionaries and social scientists had in the socially regenerative power of applied knowledge. We cannot understand the project of the social scientists without putting it within the context of the religious reformers who shared such similar backgrounds and goals. As an example, consider Emory Bogardus and William Carlson Smith, both professors of sociology at the University of Southern California who became involved with the Survey of Race Relations through their connection with George Gleason and the YMCA of Los Angeles. Bogardus had grown up on a farm outside of the small Midwest town of Belvidere, Illinois. Upon attending college in Chicago, he had been shocked and forever changed by the progressive and cosmopolitan values which he encountered, explaining that until that time he had accepted without question the literal interpretation of the Bible. The YMCA movement had affected him powerfully, and for the rest of his life Bogardus struggled to fulfil the tenets of ‘practical religion’: “I learned that real tests of religion are what one does with his religious beliefs, what they do for one, and that daily behavior is a yardstick of what a person’s religion means to him.” He served as the Director of the School of Social Work at USC as well as the head of the Department of Sociology, and was instrumental in the Goodwill Industries of Los Angeles, which collected donated goods and sold them to raise funds for charity work. 30 William Carlson Smith had been a teacher in Assam, India, with the American 30 All information from Emory Bogardus, A History of Sociology at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1972) and his autobiography, Much Have I Learned (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1962). Quote from page 27. Bogardus’ autobiography was written during his retirement, along the narrative of a personal journey of constant learning and selfdiscovery. Curiously, he also published two autobiographical volumes of Shakespearian sonnets which he had written throughout his life and travels, entitled The Traveller (1956) and The Explorer (1961). 22
Baptist Foreign Mission Society before attending graduate school in sociology, and Smith’s dissertation at the University of Chicago was based upon his mission experiences among the Ao Naga tribe in India. 31 The ‘social gospel’ which advocated daily efforts to make the world a better place underwrote every moment of Bogardus and Smith’s work in social science. We cannot understand their devotion to sociology without taking into account their involvement in programs of personal and social improvement. The overlapping backgrounds and shared sense of social mission of the Protestant ministers and the social scientists allow us to understand why the one man who did not subscribe to the vision of the Survey of Race Relations as a device for social reform, Robert E. Park of the University of Chicago, was so insistent in his criticisms of the missionaries who were his allies. Park, a member of Chicago’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology, felt that sociology had been too closely allied with missionaries for too long, and made it a point to try and distance social science from religious organizations. One of the most prominent social scientists in the country at the time, Park had been chosen by Merle Davis and the Insitute of Social and Religious Research to become the Research Director of the Survey of Race Relations. He brought to the survey not only a badge of scientific expertise, but a very different outlook on social science than many of his colleagues. To the eventual consternation of many of the missionaries, Park was also the most influential of the survey researchers. Park was not a follower of E.A. Ross and other sociologists who saw themselves as advocates for social reform. To him, the role of sociology was not the improvement of society, but the description of it and how it worked. Park often professed a deep-felt distaste for the motives of ‘do-gooders:’ 31 William Carlson Smith Papers, UCSB Library, microfilmed from originals in the Robert Cantwell Papers, University of Oregon Library, Special Collections. 23
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