Use of Personal Documents - Le Moyne - Le Moyne College

Allport’s (1942) Use of Personal Documents: 

A Contemporary Reappraisal 

Vincent W. Hevern, Ph.D. 

Le Moyne College 

Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, 

Boston, MA, August, 1999 

Allport’s advocacy of proper research methodology for a scientific psychology of the individual 

person received crucial and comprehensive expression in a 1942 monograph, published by the 

Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which examined a broad class of non-experimental 

data sources. Recent historiographical studies of the SSRC and of Allport’s scholarly program in 

the 1930s and further archival sources are deployed to understand (1) theoretical concerns 

and socio-cultural factors reflected in Allport’s analysis, (2) the functions served by its 

publication for psychology and the wider social science community, and (3) an appraisal of its 

continuing status and relevance for researchers focusing upon personal documentary sources. 

After completing his doctoral degree at Harvard in 1922, Gordon W. Allport traveled to 

Europe to explore the state of Continental (particularly German) and British psychology during 

a two-year Sheldon postgraduate fellowship. Writing about this experience near the end of his 

life, he described “the powerful impact of [his] German teachers” in both Berlin and, later, 

Hamburg, upon his subsequent professional development. 1 He recognized a special debt to 

William Stern in whose Hamburg home he lived for six months and who taught him the 

difference between “the common variety of differential psychology…and a truly personalistic 

psychology that focuses upon the organization, and not the mere profiling, of an individual’s 

traits.” 2 Indeed, in a 1924 paper Allport contended that contemporary methodologies of 

personality study were flawed by an analytic reduction of the person to a set of unconnected 

and separate traits. 3 What was lost, he argued, was that particular constellation or “form 

quality” of personal traits which comprise actual individuals in their unique integration. Though 

he moved beyond the Gestalt-inspired language of this early formulation, Allport maintained a 

dogged interest in both the “undivided” individual personality and scientific methods of 

studying such individuals throughout four subsequent decades of research and teaching. He 

returned repeatedly to a consideration of the pivotal role played by research methodology visà-vis 

a scientific understanding of the individual personality. 4 His approach to proper 

methodology, however, often conflicted with the prevailing experimental operationism of his 

colleagues. Reflecting on the impact of his German postgraduate experience, Allport noted that 

“by the time I returned to America I was already a little bit out of touch and out of step with 

the Anglo-American traditions of positivism, statistics, and objectivism. Ever since then I’ve 

been somewhat of a maverick.” 5 As Mischel remarks, Allport’s was “the lone voice speaking out 

critically against [the] dimensionalization of personality with numbers” during the 1930s and 

beyond. 6 

The centrality ascribed by Allport to proper research method and the monograph which 

is the subject of this paper can be judged from the initial pages of the autobiographical essay 

he wrote the year before his death. There he posed the query -- “how shall a psychological life 

I am grateful to Le Moyne College and its Faculty Research and Development Committee for a sabbatical 

leave in 1998-1999 which permitted me freedom from other academic responsibilities so that I might work on this 

and other projects. The staff of the Orradre Library at Santa Clara University were particularly helpful in securing 

many materials used in this study. Citations from the Gordon W. Allport Papers are used with permission of the 

Harvard University Archives. Materials from the records of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) are cited 

with permission of the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), Sleepy Hollow, NY, and I am particularly grateful to Monica 

S. Blank, Managing Archivist at the RAC, for her help in identifying and locating materials related to the Committee 

on Appraisal of Research. 

Correspondence and comments regarding this paper may be directed to the author at Department of 

Psychology, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY 13214. Electronic mail may be sent to hevern@maple.lemoyne.edu. 

© 1999 Vincent Hevern

Hevern: Allport’s (1942) Use of Personal Documents 

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history be written?” -- and suggested that pursuing an answer to this question was, perhaps, 

the unifying theme of his professional career. 7 He then pointed to his 1942 work, The Use of 

Personal Documents in Psychological Science (UPD), which summarized “important published 

researches” about this question. 8 Yet, the work to which he refers has been out of print for 

more than four decades and is now available to most students and researchers only as a single 

volume within the collection of older college or university libraries. Nonetheless, the text holds 

a prominent place within Allportian scholarship in his own estimation and this essay seeks to 

detail reasons for this judgment. 

Prepared for the Committee on Appraisal of Research (CAR) of the Social Science 

Research Council (SSRC), the UPD is a 210-page reflection upon scientific knowledge in 

psychology and appropriate research methodologies employing a broad class of nonexperimental 

data sources: “any self-revealing record that intentionally or unintentionally 

yields information regarding the structure, dynamics, and functioning of the author’s mental 

life” 9 In a three-part structure, Allport charts the use, the form, and the value of personal 

documents within the science of psychology. He provides a comprehensive survey of the 

literature derived from these data with citations of almost 200 individual works from 1881 until 

1941. The references he examined tend to be contemporary with more than half published in 

the previous decade and 84% appearing since 1922. 10 He analyzes the uncritical, critical, and 

experimental uses of documents from an historical perspective. After explaining 13 different 

motivations for authoring personal documents (special pleading, exhibitionism, desire for 

order, etc.) he groups them into four basic categories (autobiographies, questionnaires and 

interview transcripts, diaries and letters, and artistic and projective documents). He argues the 

case against personal documents (their lack of objectivity, poor validity, etc.) as well as the 

rationale for their use. He insists that researchers apply the traditional criteria of science -- “an 

understanding, a power of prediction, and a power of control, beyond that which [one] can 

achieve through … unaided common sense” -- in judging their utility. 11 He concludes that their 

use is not only justified but that 

Properly used, such documents anchor a discipline in the bedrock of human experience, make 

the most of the predilictive value of the single case in the normal process of human thought, 

exploit the idiographic principles of reasoning, and aid in meeting (more adequately than can 

unaided actuarial methods of work) the three critical tests of science: understanding, prediction, 

and control. 12 

Some recent commentators have lauded the UPD as the “classic text,” the “standard 

reference” or the “beacon” for investigators interested in human documents as raw materials 

suitable for the study of personality and behavior. 13 Nonetheless, the same work has been 

frequently overlooked by psychologists and other social scientists in the decades following its 

publication and more than ten years have passed since the last analyses specifically examined 

this monograph. 14 

The neglect afforded the UPD is unfortunate, but understandable. For at least two 

decades following the Second World War, both the laboratory-based experimental paradigm 

and its allies in the fields of clinical testing and applied quantitative measurement tended to 

define American psychology completely. Little room remained for the viewpoint Allport 

advocated. 15 Only in the last two decades has psychology’s understanding of itself historically 

and conceptually been opened to the kinds of research sources and critiques which might 

appreciate the UPD as more than a curiosity swept aside by the juggernaut of experimental 

positivism. 

From the perspective of the historian, consider three recent historical advances which 

address issues congenial to Allport’s own stance: (1) Danziger’s seminal analysis of the social 

structuring of psychological experimentation and the changeable, even narrowed, role of 

“subjects” in early 20 th century research projects; (2) his subsequent study of the sociocultural 

construction of now commonplace linguistic categories such as intelligence, personality and 



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motivation which emerged in the psychological research of the pre-World War II era, and (3) 

the growing appreciation of multiple interacting social and cultural forces and goals which 

shaped the direction of American psychological science during the discipline’s first seventy-five 

years, e.g., the impact of the both world wars or the needs of industry and government for 

analytic tools and social knowledge by which to manage social masses. 16 These findings open 

an arena in which Allport’s methodological arguments assume a more central importance than 

was evident to many peers in the decades immediately after 1942. Of course, some 

contemporaries seem to have intuited the value of Allport’s stance. In early 1940, Princeton 

psychologist, Carroll Pratt, reported to him the rebuke of John Gilbert Beebe-Center when he 

questioned Allport’s logic about individual cases: “’Listen Pratt,’ said Beebe-Center, ‘what 

Gordon in doing is so goddam much more important than anything you or I have ever done or 

ever will do that it isn’t even funny’.” 17 

In parallel to the work of recent historians of the behavioral sciences have been two 

complimentary theoretical phenomena which extend or, at least, have an affinity for certain 

Allportian themes: (1) a wide-ranging critique of positivism in social science which seeks, at 

least, to raise the question of different conceptions of the nature of the social scientific 

enterprise, and (2) the development during the past 15 years of alternative perspectives in 

psychology in response to these critiques. These perspectives have been variously termed 

interpretivist, narrative, hermeneutic, discursive and cultural. 18 The vantage provided both by 

these historical and theoretical understandings and the data I examine in the bulk of this paper 

lead me to suggest that Allport’s UPD serves as an important mid-point of demarcation: on one 

side lie unrealized 19 th century aspirations for a cultural-historical science of the person 

(Geisteswissenschaft) or Wundt’s “second psychology” which Allport glimpsed in his work with 

Stern and others in Germany while on the other stands an expanding contemporary 

engagement by psychologists in biographical data and the life story as research foci. 19 

I will revisit Allport’s UPD in three stages. First, I explore the context within which the 

monograph was written by examining the institutional concerns of its sponsor, the SSRC, and 

the author’s own preoccupations in the years before he wrote the UPD. I will note ways in 

which these concerns and preoccupations found representation within the manuscript he 

fashioned. Secondly, I offer a brief narrative on the process by which he composed the actual 

text of the monograph. Previous descriptions have failed to make clear why it was Allport who 

undertook this work and how he approached its completion. Finally, I survey responses of his 

professional colleagues both privately and in print as they provided an estimate of his 

achievement in the UPD. 

A. The SSRC as Sponsor 

I. Background to the UPD 

The composition of the UPD was not the result of an independent decision by Allport to 

undertake this arduous task on the basis of his own scholarly judgment. Rather, it arose at an 

historical intersection of pressing institutional concerns by its commissioning sponsor, the 

SSRC, and an amalgam of professional and personal beliefs, goals, and responsibilities by its 

author. Before considering how Allport’s situation is reflected the style and content of the UPD, 

I propose to examine first how the SSRC originally came to ask Allport to prepare this 

appraisal and the role it was expected to serve in the organization’s understanding of its own 

mission. 

We should recognize that the importance of the SSRC and similar research organizations 

has begun to receive increasing scholarly attention over the past generation. As historian 

Olivier Zunz argues, from the second half of the 19th through the middle of the 20 th century, 

the development of world-wide dominance by the U.S. economically and politically rested upon 

a unique “institutional matrix of business corporations, research universities and institutes, 

government agencies, and foundations” which deployed a “reorganization of knowledge, [and] 



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not merely the power of capital accumulation” in order to achieve the American hegemony so 

clearly in view by the 1950s. 20 Crucial to reorganizing knowledge was the role of “social 

intelligence” –- a term of economist Edmund Day of the Rockefeller Foundation and, later, 

President of Cornell University -- by which social scientists sought “the understanding and 

control of social institutions and social processes in the solution of pressing social problems.” 21 

In this century, private philanthropic foundations, notably the Laura Spelman Rockefeller 

Memorial (LSRM), offered extensive funding for both university- and private institute-based 

research projects in pursuit of higher levels of social intelligence. 22 The commission to Allport 

which resulted in the UPD is an example of that “institutional matrix” in action and reflected 

SSRC expectations that significant fundamental improvements could be achieved in the 

generation of social knowledge. 

Organized initially in 1923 by Wesley C. Mitchell and Charles E. Merriam of the American 

Political Science Association and incorporated the following year, the Social Science Research 

Council served as the predominant coordinating body for cross-disciplinary research across 

seven academic fields (anthropology, economics, history, political science, psychology, 

sociology, and statistics) during the years leading up to the Second World War and beyond. 23 

Headquartered in New York City, the SSRC was funded predominantly over its first two 

decades of existence by grants from the LSRM and other Rockefeller-connected sources. 

During those years the Council influenced the direction of American social science via multiple 

routes: its postgraduate fellowship and grant-in-aid programs, its sponsorship of 

interdisciplinary conferences, technical consultation to governmental commissions and 

bureaus, and the commissioning of a broad set of focused research projects. 24 . 

In the years preceding the Great Depression, the SSRC initiated research projects which 

sought to elucidate both fundamental issues in social science theory and practical means by 

which these fields might contribute to the national commonweal. 25 One early effort at crossdisciplinary 

theoretical work beginning in 1923 involved the Committee on Scientific Method in 

the Social Sciences (CSMSS). Kenneth Prewett, currently head of the SSRC, judges that this 

committee “labored long and hard but not entirely successfully.” 26 Under the leadership of 

Stuart A. Rice, it produced equivocal results during six years of effort. Its final report, Methods 

in Social Science: A Case Book (published in 1931), advanced the demand for a rigorously 

scientific methodology in the social sciences but failed to achieve any overall synthesis of 

approach by which such a lofty goal might be reached. As Fisher notes, “the difficulties in 

establishing one perspective on social research, which meant a common universe of discourse, 

had proved insurmountable.” 27 With the onset of severe dislocation in the American economic 

and social system in the early 1930s, the SSRC shifted its focus increasingly from foundational 

or theoretical issues to practical pursuits in which social science might alleviate effects of the 

economic downturn. 28 

Beginning its second decade of operation, troubling questions regarding its purpose, 

direction, and perhaps, funding began to confront the SSRC. Donald Fisher concludes that the 

Council faced a choice by the second half the 1930s: Would it primarily advance plans of social 

engineering and enlightened intervention in the public sphere, or would it recover a more 

formative role by promoting research to provide social science with more secure theoretical 

foundations? 29 He claims that the SSRC was under pressure to make such a choice by 

representatives of Rockefeller philanthropy who were concerned by a lack of focus in the 

Council’s work. 30 To address its future direction, a Committee on Review of Council Policy 

(CRCP) was set up in 1936. The CRCP commissioned University of Chicago sociologist, Louis 

Wirth, to evaluate the Council and its functioning. Accepting most of Wirth’s findings, the CRCP 

submitted its report to the full Council in September of 1937. The committee supported the 

view that the SSRC could “render its greatest service to society by exploring the fundamentals 

of social science.” 31 In practical terms they advised that the Council emphasize “research 

promotion, appraisal, and planning” as a overriding priority. 32 



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These recommendations led directly to the establishment of the Committee on Appraisal 

of Research (with Edward Day as its first chairman) by the Council’s central Policies and 

Procedures Committee (PPC) in September, 1937. This action was “one means of carrying into 

effect the principle that intellectual leadership in the social sciences is the primary function of 

the Council.” 33 Quoting Edwin G. Nourse, chair of the PPC, Fisher notes that Day had made a 

critical intervention before the Policies Committee. Day challenged whether the PPC “had any 

clearly formulated idea as to what social science really is or whether it was doing anything 

serious and systematic in the direction of finding out.” 34 The specific role of the newly-formed 

committee was debated at great length by the PPC on December 12, 1937 when Day further 

questioned the meaning of the word “appraisal” in its title. He preferred the phrase 

“identification of scientific accomplishment.” 35 The PPC generally agreed with Day and, even 

after he left the CAR as Chair in 1939, his understanding of appraisal—an emphasis on the 

cumulative progress of shared fundamentals across the disciplines--guided its efforts. 36 

Following internal debate by the PPC regarding how successfully the Council had responded to 

the CRCP’s original critique, the scope of the CAR’s mandate was expanded even further in 

1940 to include “planning undertakings designed specifically for general improvement of the 

quality of work in the social sciences” 37 

During its nine years of operation (1937-1946), three broadly overlapping phases 

characterized the work of the CAR: (1) appraisal of significant individual research projects 

across each discipline (1938-1940), (2) evaluation of the role of personal documents as data 

sources in social science (1940-1943), and (3) replication of previous research with personal 

documents via additional analytic approaches (1940-1946). The initial strategy adopted by the 

CAR involved the selection of “the most significant productions in [each disciplinary area] of 

specialization in America” since the First World War. In supporting this tack, Day believed that 

the committee would be able to document “the progressive development of the social sciences 

through increased emphasis on the verification of research accomplishments and the need for 

integrated, cumulative results.” 38 Notably, the CAR never authorized an appraisal in 

psychology since psychologists could never recommend a single text to appraise. Asked to 

choose between Thurstone’s Vectors of the Mind and Allport’s Personality: A Psychological 

Interpretation psychologists were too divided to justify the CAR undertaking an appraisal of 

any specific text in the discipline. 39 

From early 1938 until the middle of 1940, the CAR focused upon the specific 

reappraisals of individual publications. The most influential of these was an assessment of the 

widely-regarded study by Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 

which was carried out by Herbert Blumer to great acclaim. 40 Blumer’s success led to a crucial 

conference in New York City on December 10, 1938 at which its author, Thomas, Allport, and 

15 other social scientists met to review this appraisal. 41 In wide-ranging discussions, 

participants were struck particularly by Blumer’s assertion that, despite their broad citations of 

personal documents (letters, diaries, transcripts of interviews), Thomas and Znaniecki’s 

conclusions were not directly and inductively derived from the documents themselves. Rather, 

the first-person data sources they used only confirmed their judgments originally generated 

via other means and evidence. 

The impact of Blumer’s conclusions was sufficiently strong that the CAR found it now 

faced a new issue. At its July 28, 1940 meeting Ernest Burgess suggested to the CAR that it 

undertake an examination of the “recent development in the use of human document material 

in social science research.” 42 Burgess, Robert Redfield, and Donald Young prepared a 

memorandum for the committee outlining how this suggestion might be implemented. In 

September, 1940 CAR Chairman Redfield reported to the full Council this plan of action which 

linked the expanded responsibilities of the committee to investigate new methods of research 

in the social science with Blumer’s powerful critique. More specifically, Redfield suggested that 

the CAR undertake four experimental projects. Several of these would replicate via alternative 

methods a well-regarded study of Robert Angell on the impact of the Depression upon the 

family for which personal documents had served as principal data sources. He also tentatively 



6 

suggested that “we re-employ Blumer to do the general overall critical review of the literature 

upon the human document in sociology.” 43 

At its October, 20, 1940 meeting, the CAR endorsed the two-prong strategy of Burgess 

and his colleagues which Redfield discussed the month before. First, Robert Angell rather than 

Herbert Blumer would be asked to prepare a literature review of the use of the personal 

document in sociology. And, secondly, a “repeat study of the data in Angell’s ‘The Family 

Encounters the Depression’” would employ alternative analytic methods while parallel work 

employing Angell’s methodology would be used with a different data set. 44 The committee 

hoped that these studies would demonstrate the repeatability of scientific methods of 

investigation using documentary data in one social science, a goal reached regularly by the 

natural sciences. At the next CAR meeting on November 10, 1940, the committee’s discussion 

questioned more generally how personal documents were used in fields other than sociology. 

The committee then reviewed the names of candidates to appraise document-based research 

in each of the five other disciplines (excepting sociology and statistics). Poffenberger didn’t 

suggest any name but asked to confer with Robert M. Elliott about a possible candidate in 

psychology. 45 In sum, the work of Blumer had brought the CAR to a theoretical impasse which 

again confronted the SSRC with the need to review fundamental questions about the 

generation of knowledge in the social sciences–a methodological conundrum left unsolved by 

the work of the CSMSS a decade earlier. The stage was set, too, for the role Allport was to 

play in assessing the utility of personal documents in psychological science. 

B. Gordon W. Allport as Author 

Recently published studies of Allport and his colleagues during the 1920s through 1940s 

have begun to fill in the gap created by the absence of any comprehensive biography of 

Allport. They provide extremely helpful contexts and insights by which to evaluate the author’s 

concerns in the pre-War era. Let me review briefly three studies appearing since 1997 and link 

them to more general themes which influenced Allport’s efforts in the UPD: Ian Nicholson’s 

work on Allport’s ethical and value system in its relationship to the development of personality 

psychology, Katherine Pandora’s pivotal history of Allport and the Murphys, Gardner and Lois 

Barclay, during the 1930s, and Nicole Barenbaum’s investigation of Allport’s use of cases. I will 

also briefly look at Allport’s relationship with German refugee psychologists before World War 

II because of its influence on his willingness to work on the UPD. 

Personality Psychology and Enduring Ethical Concerns. Ian Nicholson has ably 

documented the impact of Allport’s upbringing and personal belief system upon the new 

“personality psychology” which he championed in the 1920s and 1930s. 46 Allport embraced the 

new language of “personality,” Nicholson argues, as a psychological concept capable of 

empirical and objective study in a way that the earlier notion of “character,” so laden with 

moralistic and religious overtones, could never be. Simultaneously, though, Allport’s study of 

enduring personality traits presupposes an essential unity of the individual which behaviorallyoriented 

peers never endorsed. Further, study of personality tended to restore to prominence 

in psychological discourse older Victorian ideals of the productive, conscientious, and morallyupright 

citizen. 47 Nicholson points to descriptors of the mature personality which Allport 

detailed at length in his groundbreaking text, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. Many 

of these qualities embody a 19 th century ethical sensibility. 48 As Jerome Bruner who 

collaborated closely with Allport as a graduate student suggested recently “there was, in a 

word, an enormous concern with individuality in Allport’s work. I sometimes think that it grew 

not so much from political convictions, but from religious ones stemming from Protestant 

theology. Each soul, as it were, had a uniqueness for him…” 49 

A clear sensitivity to ethical issues and values, particularly the sacredness of the 

individual as an ethical value beyond par, is evident throughout the UPD. In arguing the case 

for personal documents, Allport held that they have the potential to align science on the side of 

a democratic value system: “According to the ethics of democracy, respect and value are to be 



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ascribed to each individual person. But mass methods of research do little to engender 

understanding or respect for the individual person. A shift of interest to personal 

documents…cannot fail to bring psychological science closer in life with the ethics of 

democracy.” 50 Later, he argues: “In a democratic society the therapeutist is required to 

advance the welfare of the person: personal documents tell him wherein this welfare 

consists.” 51 In countering a objection that personal documents can be self-deceiving, Allport 

argued that they express “one person’s view of life. A person is a self-regarding focus of 

value…Every self regards itself as sacred, and a document produced from precisely this point 

of view is exactly what we desire.” 52 Similarly, he pointed out that “inviolable self-regard 

seems to be the eternal thread found in all personal documents. But this expression of egovalue 

is precisely what we want in a document.” 53 

Creating a Psychological Science for a Democratic Society. In the absence of a definitive 

biography, the compelling study of Katherine Pandora, Rebels within the Ranks (1997), stands 

as the best available study of Allport in the years before the Second World War. 54 Her analysis 

is closely allied with the general thrust of Nicholson’s findings. She traces the socio-political 

goals of Allport and the Murphys, Gardner and Lois Barlcay, during the 1930s as they 

challenged the conventional experimental ethos of American psychology. These “rebels” 

offered an expanded alternative vision of psychological science more supportive of democratic 

ideals and practices. Pandora builds upon Nicholson’s review by examining Allport’s ethical 

concerns as they relate primarily to the public sphere. In Allport’s view, a science aligned with 

matters of urgent civic moment was imperative if totalitarian and fascist tendencies arising 

from the political and economic disorder of the era were to be defeated and democratic 

principles advanced. 55 These scholarly nonconformists, Pandora argues, “rejected the image of 

the laboratory as an ivory tower, contested the canons of objectivity that characterized current 

research practice, and argued against reducing the natural and unnatural worlds to the lowest 

possible terms.” 56 

Allport’s dissent took a variety of forms including his insistent demand that psychology 

account scientifically for individuals, and not just groups, at the levels of description, 

prediction, and control. He inveighed repeatedly against orthodox empiricists who believed 

that knowledge of a population’s average was equivalent to knowing about specific individuals 

within that population. 57 For example, coincidental to writing the UPD, Allport completed a 

lengthy critique of a manuscript on the prediction of personal adjustment by Horst, Wallin, and 

Guttman which he submitted to SSRC Director, Robert T. Crane. Allport broadly castigated 

their text for its methodological one-sidedness and bias. He observed that “as we approach the 

‘sub-class’ of one, the whole process [of prediction] seems to change and we predict from 

intimate knowledge of the single case (from its own laws of behavior), and not on the grounds 

of the behavior of whole populations.” 58 He would later describe the UPD to Crane as 

“essentially an elaboration” of this critique and included an explicit review of his arguments 

about prediction of individual lives in the UPD itself. 59 

Allport feared that an unacceptable price--one destructive of democracy--would be 

exacted eventually for the narrowed scientific focus of social science knowledge gathered in 

this period. As Olivier Zunz comments, “by resorting to all sorts of averaging and using only 

what they thought were neutral categories of knowledge in a multicultural society, Americans 

also learned how to sanitize facts by avoiding the complexities embedded in class, gender, 

age, race, or ethnicity.” 60 Allport gave a particularly explicit expression of his fears in an 

unpublished keynote address presented at the 75 th anniversary meeting of the New England 

Intercollegiate Conference on Psychology (NEICP) on April 4, 1941 at the University of New 

Hampshire in Durham. 61 . His audience consisted primarily of undergraduate students and his 

talk sought to chart the near future of the discipline they were beginning to study. Allport 

depicted the assault on humanity’s sense of self-worth and value which some types of science 

seemed to encourage. He claimed that “especially in modern psychology man does not 

recognize himself, at least not the best that is in him. Disillusioned and disgusted with science 

man turns to political movements to recover his sense of self-importance. Totalitarianism with 



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all its arrogant stupidity may win his allegiance.” 62 Allport had just begun to work on the UPD 

at the time he gave this talk. It is no wonder, then, that Allport reminds his readers in the UPD 

that “until recently psychologists have been inclined to detach themselves from politics and 

from ethics, but social catastrophe is now breaking down this isolation.” 63 

Throughout the late 1930s Allport engaged in an escalating rhetoric of disagreement 

over scientific methodology with his experimentally-inclined colleagues. 64 His motivation 

embraced the vision of a more broadly realistic psychology, one grounded in daily life. He was 

convinced of its potential to address fundamental human concerns. Hence, he exploited 

venues, public and private, to argue for this heterodox scientific program. For example, 

consider his presidency of the APA during 1938-1939. A longstanding prerogative afforded its 

presidents was the opportunity to present a major lecture on a self-chosen topic at the 

organization’s annual convention. The significance of these talks was magnified by their 

widespread distribution; they were automatically printed in either the Psychological Review or 

Psychological Bulletin. 65 Contemplating his own remarks, Allport was aware that the addresses 

of his immediate predecessors hailed what they believed to be the growing success of 

experimental methods and statistical analyses to solve theoretical and practical problems of 

importance to psychologists. In 1933 Louis Thurstone heralded the power of multiple factor 

analysis to describe human mental abilities. In 1934 Joseph Peterson detailed technical 

advances in behavioral explanations for perceptual and motor learning in organisms. In 1936, 

Clark Hull offered an extremely detailed rationale for a hypothetico-deductive system which 

would secure psychology’s identity as a (quasi-natural) science. And, the following year 

Edward C. Tolman discussed “the complex of causal determinants” of the behavior of rats in a 

laboratory maze and found important motivational principles of significance for organisms 

generally. Finally, in 1938, John Frederick Dashiell portrayed the relations between psychology 

and other fields as increasingly interdisciplinary and, perhaps with some naïve expectancy, 

claimed to discern signs of a growing rapprochement between the experimental and “clinical” 

viewpoints within psychology itself. 66 

In Karl Scheibe’s estimate, “this was a Dark Age for the human being in psychology, for 

the force of the scientific theology swept all before it,” -- a time which reflected “the conceit 

that everything of psychological importance could in principle be demonstrated by the rat at 

the choice point in the maze.” 67 In response, Allport offered a powerful dissent to the claims of 

his laboratory-based peers in his presidential talk delivered just six days after Hitler had 

invaded Poland in 1939. 68 Entitled “The Psychologist’s Frame of Reference” Allport first 

presented a solidly empirical survey of trends across fifty years of scientific publication. He 

highlighted the recent growth in animal and nonverbal human research topics which avoided 

altogether higher levels of human cognition. He pointed to the growth of sophisticated 

statistical analyses and methodological demands for operationalism, the “watchword of an 

austere empiricism.” 69 He, then, engaged in a sharply rhetorical reflection upon the sterility 

and dangers resulting from the methodological directions revealed in that review. 70 His 

language was, at turns, slyly ironic, broadly jocular, and pointedly scornful. 

In the second half of his address, Allport explicitly singled out articles and opinions of 

experimental purists—Lashley, Tolman, Bills, Stevens, and Boring among them—and 

challenged their claim to an exclusive understanding of research methods required by 

psychological science. He characterized his positivist peers as divorced from the urgent 

concerns of a world in chaos: “though [the experimentalist] generally repudiates a dualism of 

mind and body, he welcomes the equally stultifying dualism of laboratory and life.” 71 In an 

audacious coda, Allport focused upon historical rigidities in political thought (autocracy in 

ancient Greece, the medieval Church) and included the example of E. R. Jaensch, head of the 

German psychological society and Nazi-ideologue, who advocated a psychology tied closely to 

the racist aims of his government. 72 In arguing from these potentially explosive examples, 

Allport sought to uphold the advantage of a pluralism in psychology’s scientific methods: “the 

desirability of keeping alive diversified investigations and a diversified sense of importance is 

the generous lesson that democracy teaches us.” 73 As he would argue before the students at 



9 

the University of New Hampshire 18 months later, he feared the outcome of a cultist disregard 

for real-life issues and the embrace of trivial research projects by many experimentalists who 

demanded “slavish subservience” to the operational propositions famously advanced by A. G. 

Bills. Thus, Allport called for a psychology which would also be “rational, teleological, 

qualitative, idiographic, synoptic, and even non-operational”. 74 In the years following this talk, 

the UPD served as a major new platform in which he would advocate these goals in detail. 

The Use of Case Studies. Nicole Barenbaum has taken exception to the observation 

made by some critics that, for all of his advocacy of case studies and personal documents in 

the understanding of the individual, Allport only undertook a single case study himself, that of 

“Jenny” and her letters. 75 In a finely documented account, she demonstrates that by 1938 

Allport was working upon a second but ultimately unpublished case, that of “Marion Taylor” (a 

pseudonym), and he did so most probably with his wife, Ada, as a close collaborator. 

Let me expand upon Barenbaum’s analysis. The criticism that Allport had very limited 

experience with actual case studies rests upon the criterion of formal publication. In Letters 

from Jenny, his work became available to the public while, in the example of “Marion Taylor,” 

his (and Ada Allport’s) analysis never reached print. Commentators, though, seem to overlook 

the pedagogical use of personal documents and case studies for which Allport had a far 

broader experience and commitment beginning early in his teaching career and continuing 

until his retirement. Indeed, in a recent paper, Barenbaum points to Allport’s graduate classes 

in the late 1930s in which he sought to expand the scientific grounding of case study methods; 

the research findings of several students in these seminars did reach print. 76 Jerome Bruner, a 

participant in Allport’s seminar, recently recalled that “[Allport] was very interested somehow 

in specifying a set of rules that would, in the course of autobiography, describe some sort of 

inherent organization of the person that was responsive to, yet autonomous from, the person 

as socially or culturally defined by her position in the world.” 77 (Barenbaum also identifies 

Allport’s editorship of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology as the prompt for a 

renewed appearance of published case studies in that journal from 1943 through 1949.) 

An early example of case-based pedagogy comes in Allport’s use of the autobiography of 

University of Wisconsin English professor, William Ellery Channing Leonard, entitled The 

Locomotive God. 78 Writing to its author in 1928, Allport described that he and his wife 

originally came upon Leonard’s poem, Two Lives, in the autumn of 1927 and subsequently 

read the autobiography which “fitted almost miraculously with my own interests and plans.” 79 

Allport explained that he had been “not entirely satisfied with my methods” of teaching a 

course in personality at both Harvard and Dartmouth. So, he created an “experimental course” 

which employed “the case-method” and the “intuitive or verstehende method” with 16 Junior 

and Senior Dartmouth students. Allport devised a detailed series of “Leitfragen” or focused 

questions tied to the content of Leonard’s text which would provoke student thought and 

reflection. 80 He sent a copy of these questions to Leonard for his review and asked for his frank 

opinion about a possible article which Allport would write for “other psychologists [who] might 

be interested in my use of your book for instruction.” 81 A decade later, in 1938, Allport again 

praised the pedagogical utility of The Locomotive God which he regularly employed in class at 

Harvard from 1930 onward. “This morning,” Allport told Leonard, “I lectured on points raised 

by the first fifty pages of the book to a class of 250 men. Their absorption was complete and I 

can easily tell that their reading of the book is making its usual deep and beneficent 

impression.” 82 

The Leonard case was one of many which Allport employed in the undergraduate 

classroom. Among his papers in the Harvard University Archives, there are multiple case study 

materials including the “Case of MB (Regression or Shell Shock),” H. G. Well’s Experiment in 

Autobiography, and two cases developed by Jean Evans (“Miller” and “Johnny Rocco”) 83 

Allport’s use of “Johnny Rocco” came in his post-war Social Relations 1A class at Harvard 

where it served as the basis of class discussions about mechanisms of personality and the 

research problem of predicting individual development. 84 Other cases are also found among his 



10 

teaching notes. Allport’s commitment to the utility of personal documents in case studies 

extended well beyond the one published text usually cited. 

Allport’s long experience using case studies in teaching is reflected in the UPD in several 

ways. Leonard and Wells’ autobiographies are cited as important examples of personal 

documents with a potential to engage researchers: “the psychologist is still challenged to 

account for Leonard the individual: for the valid portions of his narrative and for his selfdeception 

as well.” 85 He also admits the use of documents such as these for illustrative and 

didactic purposes. Classroom textbooks are filled with personal documents that exemplify 

psychological principles though such materials “possess no distinctive scientific merit” unless 

they are “used as tools of discovery.” 86 He himself had derived “an empirical-intuitive theory of 

understanding from the reactions of students to reading Leonard’s Locomotive God.” 87 Finally, 

Allport displays a depth understanding of the processes by which authors of personal 

documents craft them throughout the UPD. Years of classroom review gave Allport a profound 

familiarity with these cases and he astutely employed that knowledge to explain personal 

documents in convincing fashion. 

The Situation of European Émigré Psychologists. Allport’s relationship to refugee 

psychologists in the immediate pre-war period deserves comment because of its influence on 

the UPD. In the late summer of 1940 the APA received a report from its Committee on 

Displaced Foreign Psychologists (CDFP) warning that “it is not too calamitous to say that the 

position of scientific psychology throughout the world, excepting only in the Americas is in 

extremis. Virtually the only way now open to us to fight for our professional integrity is to 

strengthen our efforts in behalf of psychologists who have managed to take refuge here from 

tyranny abroad.” 88 Allport had initiated this committee at the beginning of his APA presidency 

in 1938 and served on it personally and continuously until it ceased functioning in 1943, well 

after the United States entered the war. 89 The CDFP was charged initially with the task of 

“surveying the problem of psychologists displaced from their positions and livelihood in other 

countries and seeking asylum and professional opportunities elsewhere.” But, it was forced 

almost immediately to expand its task to include finding “non-competitive” positions for the 

hundreds of refugee scholars and clinicians who found themselves, jobless and without 

resources, in America. 90 

Allport’s close familiarity with German academic psychologists over the years since his 

sojourn in Europe in 1922-1924 resulted in his serving as a crucial resource in the efforts of 

several psychologists to escape fascist governments even prior to the establishment of the 

CDFP. Allport witnessed the malignant aftereffects of Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933 

upon the lives of friends and colleagues: the suicides of psychologists Martha Muchow and 

Otto Lipmann, the destruction of William Stern’s Hamburg laboratory and many of his 

research files, and the inevitable emigration of scholars such as Karl and Charlotte Bühler and 

Stern himself. 91 Their desperation is vividly conveyed by Charlotte Bühler writing to Allport 

from Vienna in September, 1937: “I feel now however more and more the one wish to leave 

Europe for good and to settle in America…Financial and political conditions make scientific 

work in Europe increasingly difficult. We lack literature and exchange, money and security. 

Psychology has died out in Germany and was never much in other European countries. In 

child psychology, Piaget and I are fighting alone ...” 92 In the case of both his old mentor, 

William Stern as well as the Bühlers, Allport was instrumental in arranging their eventual 

settlement in the United States and securing positions for Stern and Charlotte Bühler. 93 

The sad example of German psychology, Allport’s intellectual home, weighed heavily in 

his critique of American research methods. 94 There was a visceral, passionate quality to his 

anger and dismay when he considered what had transpired on the Continent in the previous 

decade. In his NEIPC talk of April, 1941, one of Allport’s closing images was frightening: 

It is not at all beyond the range of our imagination that all of us psychologists should be 

regimented and goose-steppe (sic) from morning to night, inventing meretricious race theories, 



11 

testing ability (sic) to drive Panzar (sic) tanks, or poisoning the mind of friends and enemies alike 

with crude propaganda. Every single psychologist in Germany is doing this slave labor for an 

enslaved science. And Germany was once our model of freedom in the psychological world. 95 

In authoring the UPD, it fell to Allport–there was no one else to do the job–to communicate 

what his early colleagues, especially Stern, had taught him lest the stimulating intellectual 

world into which he entered in 1922 would, like Stern’s research notes, be lost forever. He 

had been sure to highlight the work of Spranger, Stern, Bühler, and others in his earlier 

Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. 96 In the UPD, he again assayed the contributions 

of Stern and Bühler, both of whom had done considerable work with life documents. Indeed, 

he expanded his analysis of the idiographic uses of documentary data which they inspired 

considerably beyond his 1937 textbook. 

II. The Monograph: Preparation and Scope 

On December 17, 1940 Poffenberger wrote Allport introducing him to a “comprehensive 

survey of the use of the personal document in Social Science” which the CAR had begun to 

conduct. He solicited Allport’s advice about who might carry out a survey in psychology as well 

as how long and costly such a project might be. 97 Responding within a week, Allport nominated 

himself for such an undertaking: “no psychologists excepting myself and the Hamburg 

Psychological Institute have been interested in the systematic study of this problem from the 

methodological perspective. And now, of course, the Hamburg Institute is destroyed and the 

two leading figures in this methodological work (Stern and Muchow) are dead.” 98 Here the 

experiences of Germany under fascism served as a motivation in Allport’s decision to volunteer 

for this effort: his continuing debt to Stern was clear. 

On January 10, 1941 Poffenberger was enthusiastic in accepting Allport’s selfnomination: 

“I am grateful, too, that you modestly suggest yourself as the man to do the job, 

for you certainly are that!” He further defined the task to include “a thorough and critical 

examination of the use of the Personal Document in psychology in order that its good points 

may be applied in other divisions of Social Science and its bad points avoided.” In somewhat 

confusing fashion, Poffenberger indicated that third-party case studies including whole 

biographies would not be subject to review although “personal materials included within a 

biography would be”. Allport was asked to prepare a more detailed description of the project 

along with a cost estimate for presentation to the CAR. 99 Allport immediately responded by 

proposing (1) the use of a research assistant (for a stipend of $200) throughout the spring 

semester to explore the literature and (2) his own involvement to “digest the material and put 

it in proper form for use of the SSRC” throughout the summer of 1941 (Allport asked for an 

honorarium of $500 since he would forego other “summer school work”). He suggested a 

completion date of September 1, 1941 for the project, but cautioned Poffenberger that 

“national defense work of some kind or other might claim my time and take necessary 

precedence.” 100 

Allport’s plan was accepted by the CAR and he was formally assigned the task by 

Poffenberger on February 11, 1941. 101 It was not completely clear to Allport what the CAR 

expected would be included in his review under the rubric of psychology: would it extend to 

the “closely connected” fields of anthropology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis or literature? 102 

Poffenberger clarified its scope when he informed Allport that “the Committee did not discuss 

just what the limits of psychology were to be. It is my impression, however, that we are 

justified in limiting [your study] so as to exclude the obviously psychoanalytic and 

psychiatric…Literature as such should not be included, although when literary works as 

biographies are used by psychologists for interpretive purposes, then they would be 

included.” 103 

With these guidelines in hand, Allport immediately began to work on the project. It is 

not clear whom he hired to assist in the research for the Spring, 1941 semester. He had asked 



12 

for a stipend for a single assistant but spoke about “research assistants [who] have been 

working along” in a note to Poffenberger at the end of May. In this same message he 

acknowledged receipt of Angell’s appraisal of personal documents in sociology in manuscript 

form which would help guide his own study 104 Whether one or more assistants were hired, 

Allport did devise a comprehensive five-page questionnaire by which to extract the most 

salient characteristics of each study under review. Since the finished UPD contains almost 200 

separate items, it is no wonder that later he would note: “this schedule was found to be too 

searching.” 105 The actual writing of the monograph did not begin until June, 1941. 106 By that 

time, Allport had already secured a later completion deadline of October 1. The concurrent 

press of work that spring which required “some interruptions for defense work” as well as the 

project “turn[ing] out to be larger than I thought” were reasons Allport advanced to justify his 

need for additional time. 107 

Throughout the spring and summer of 1941 competing tasks clamored for Allport’s 

attention. Along with Robert Yerkes, he led a standing committee on psychological factors in 

morale, formed by the Emergency Committee on Psychology. This group worked intensively 

during the winter and spring of 1941 on a survey and bibliography on German Psychological 

Welfare which was published that June. 108 As James Capshew notes, Allport’s Harvard office 

from this period onward served as “an unofficial clearinghouse for morale studies as well as a 

communications center for social psychologists seeking national service.” 109 I’ve previously 

mentioned the keynote speech Allport presented on April 4, 1941 to the NEICP at the 

University of New Hampshire. 110 The extensive critique which Allport offered to SSRC Executive 

Director Crane regarding the monograph of Horst et al. on the prediction of personal 

adjustment was submitted on June 2, 1941. Later in August Ernest Burgess sent Allport an 

additional set of papers – by himself, Cottrell and Stouffer – on the question of case study and 

asked for their immediate review prior to a Chicago sociological meeting in September. 111 

Allport completed an analysis of these works as Burgess requested: an archival copy of a 

heavily-corrected 3-page analysis of Stouffer’s paper attests to Allport’s conscientious 

review. 112 Allport also commented on a fourth paper by George A. Lundberg presented at the 

same Chicago symposium. Lundberg thanked Allport for his comments in a letter of October 2, 

1941. 113 Lundberg also stated that he would like to obtain a copy of Allport’s remarks to 

Burgess, presumably dealing with Burgess’ own paper. Throughout the preparation of the UPD 

Allport’s attention seems to have been divided among a variety of pressing tasks. Nonetheless, 

he submitted multiple copies of his completed manuscript to Crane on October 1. In doing so 

he acknowledged his viewpoint on the role of personal documents would provoke criticism by 

other social scientists, but he could “only hope that my present report which is a continuation 

of the discussion will result in still further clarifications. I fully realize that I am in the minority. 

But, I believe that minority voices have their place.” 114 

III. Response to the UPD 

Allport’s manuscript circulated among members of the CAR directly upon its receipt in 

New York. And, in response its readers were enthusiastic and uniformly appreciative of the 

quality and scope of his analysis. Poffenberger sent Allport a handwritten note as soon as he 

completed reading the UPD: “It is just such a masterly job as I knew you would turn out. I 

want to express my personal appreciation over and above anything that the Council may 

formally say…My recommendation is to publish it as a special [SSRC] bulletin…” 115 Similarly, 

Edwin Nourse, Director of The Brookings Institution and CAR member, praised the study to 

Allport in a letter on October 27: “I want to express the very great enjoyment and intellectual 

stimulus that I derived from reading this document.” He went on to report that enough 

members of the CAR were present at a PPC meeting two days earlier that they had “come to a 

unanimous and enthusiastic decision to print this report promptly as a Council bulletin.” 116 

Their motivation to move ahead quickly with publication rested upon both “the high quality of 

the review and its methodological value for others preparing similar appraisals.” 117 It is 

noteworthy that Allport’s work would appear in print prior to the already completed report of 



13 

Angell regarding documents in sociology. The Use of Personal Documents in Psychological 

Science was published in March, 1942 and reissued in 1951. 118 

Judged by its sales, Allport’s text was one of the CAR’s more successful volumes. In its 

first month of distribution, the SSRC sold an average of 10 copies per day, a rate higher than 

any other bulletin in the past. 119 Three years following the UPD’s publication, Ernest Burgess 

reported that 1100 copies had been distributed compared with 450 copies of the text by 

Gottschalk, Kluckhohn and Angell during its first two years in press. 120 Among the earlier CAR 

appraisal texts, Blumer’s well-received review of The Polish Peasant had sold just 465 copies 

in its first two years of distribution (September, 1939-September, 1941). 121 

Published reviews of the UPD were not extensive and those which appeared tended to 

reflect judgments congenial to the reviewers’ overall methodological allegiances. The text was 

ignored by most psychology journals: no mention of it is made in Psychological Bulletin, which 

published many reviews annually. Only two psychologists, Ralph K. White of Cornell University 

and Peter Hampton of Western College (Oxford, Ohio), seem to have commented on it in print 

while at least three notices by sociologists were forthcoming (from Robert Park, then at Fisk 

University; George A. Lundberg of Bennington College; and Emory S. Bogardus, University of 

Southern California). 122 

Peter Hampton’s 1944 review, the longest given the UPD, strongly sided with Allport’s 

attention to the “vertical dimension of behavior in a single individual” and questioned the 

ability of positivist statistical methods ever to appreciate the unique personality. “The real 

failing of the psychologist today,” Hampton argued, “is his inability or rather hesitancy in 

using his own mind in interpreting personality.” 123 In a stance foreshadowing contemporary 

themes of qualitative research validation and narrative psychological perspectives, Hampton 

saw the issue of “congruence” as central to the validity of documentary investigative methods 

and held that Allport’s balanced view of the matter was persuasive. 124 White concluded that 

Allport’s appraisal “offers a wholly satisfying synthesis.” 125 Allport’s allegiance to the familiar 

tripartite test of science--understanding, prediction, and control--in the UPD’s chapter 11 (The 

Case for Personal Documents, “the most original in the book”) was justified: idiographic 

analyses of personal documents could meet these criteria. 

Among Allport’s sociological colleagues, both Bogardus and Park were, on balance, 

favorably disposed to the text while Lundberg offered a qualified dissent. Bogardus’ reserved 

enthusiasm judged that ”the author has maintained a reasonable degree of objectivity, 

although evidently favorable from the start toward personal documents as scientific materials” 

and finds Allport’s canvass of the topic extensive and thorough. 126 Park was satisfied with the 

UPD as it provided “a particularly lucid survey, based on a wide knowledge of the literature at 

home and abroad, of the logical problems involved in the use of personal documents…for the 

understanding of human nature and society.” Yet he believed that Allport had failed “to 

indicate how these same documents could be used by idiographic sciences—for example, 

cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis—which are not sciences at all in the more austere 

sense of statistical and behavioristic psychology.” 127 Lundberg’s evaluation was judicious, if 

ultimately negative. He praised its survey of the history and use of personal documents, but 

immediately challenged Allport’s analytic method: Part III (The Value of Personal Documents) 

of the text “[repeats] the principal fallacies that have characterized discussions of this subject 

in the past…In this connection arises the old question as to whether one may generalize from 

a singe case. The author’s affirmative conclusion on this point and its attendant reasoning is 

in the opinion of this reviewer, simply fallacious.” He then cited his critique of case 

methodology published in Sociometry and invited his readers to review his argumentation 

there. 128 

What was Allport’s own evaluation of the UPD at the time he completed it? Comments in 

his correspondence indicate that he was quite apprehensive about this work and felt he had 

not achieved what he hoped he might. In response to Poffenberger’s handwritten note of 



14 

appreciation, Allport immediately poured out sentiments which, in their frankness, had not 

appeared previously in their exchanges: 

You have no idea what a relief it was to receive your unsolicited note expressing satisfaction with 

my report. The later was written with so much distraction and pressure of defense work that I 

finally sent it off with feelings of distress and failure. As a review I felt that it was adequate, but 

the burning central problem was left unsolved, and I did not even feel that I had pushed the 

solution very far forward. 129 

His next comments suggest the ambition which weighed upon his efforts: 

To render the logic of the case method acceptable to hard-headed American empiricists is a long 

and difficult job…I know I shall be soundly abused for my own failures to speak the last and 

convincing words. But it is simply too big a job, and one that requires more time and effort than 

the three months at my disposal” to complete the task. 130 

Earlier he had confided to Crane: “I do not feel entirely satisfied with the product because I 

think it is a full year’s job to write a good book on the subject.” 131 He also expressed his sense 

that the UPD was not quite sufficient a response to positivist claims in responding to Nourse’s 

positive comments: “I am only too aware of my failure to solve the riddle of the single case in 

a statistical conception of science, but shall feel satisfied if I have at least stated the riddle 

clearly enough to encourage others to work with me toward the solution.” 132 

IV. Reappraising the UPD 

What conclusions might we draw from these data to better understand Allport and his 

monograph almost sixty years after it was first issued? Let me suggest a number of 

suppositions which appear justified by the evidence I’ve gathered and presented here. 

First, the UPD stands as a more methodologically-focused though highly rhetorical 

successor to specific earlier appeals by Allport (e.g., in 1937 and 1940) for psychology to alter 

its embrace of what he believed to be a hopelessly narrow (and, therefore, fatally-flawed) 

experimentalism. The urgency of his expression lay in a profound conviction that contemporary 

psychology’s quantitative and operationalized methods, without the counterbalance of 

idiographic approaches, would fail to generate the social intelligence required to root out 

totalitarian instincts and advance democratic ideals then under severe assault. Further, he 

doubted whether quantitative results would ever permit psychology to claim title to itself as a 

science of the individual. 

Secondly, Allport’s apprehension that he had not achieved a convincing settlement of 

the problem of the “case method” proved prophetic among psychologists during the decades 

following the UPD’s publication. As his reviewers’ comments suggest, his arguments were not 

persuasive to those whose investigative toolkit required quantification, operationalization, and 

direct manipulation to authenticate the scientific quality of their work. As Danziger argues, 

some psychologists in his audience were committed to an early “stimulus-response” framework 

while others had begun to adopt the metalanguage of “variables” by the beginning of the 

1950s. 133 In either case, Allport’s stance was rejected and it would take over three decades 

before similar arguments on method could be heard once more in psychology. The abiding 

attitude in the generation following the UPD’s appearance was expressed in Robert Holt’s 

stinging 1962 description of Allport’s stance as a hardy “perennial weed in psychology’s 

conceptual garden”. 134 

Thirdly, the circle of researchers to whom the SSRC represented a vital component of 

their professional lives was narrow and tended to involve many of the same individuals in 

multiple capacities. The names of Allport, Poffenberger, Burgess, Nourse, Angell, Wirth, 

Blumer, and others appear repeatedly in the records of the PPC and the Council itself 



15 

throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. The difficulty experienced by the CAR when it failed to 

commission an appraisal of a psychological research text may have been symptomatic of a 

deeper disjunction: while some psychologists were among the SSRC’s major supporters, 

important experimental voices in psychology had little to do with the organization. Indeed, it is 

hard to escape a sense that the Committee on Appraisal of Research never fully engaged the 

mainstream positivist tradition in its work and was, therefore, never as influential as it had 

hoped it would be. 

Fourthly, this review should not be construed as a Whig history. In light of 

contemporary standards, it is clear that Allport was not interested or sensitive to some factors 

which today might be obvious: culture, ethnicity, language, gender, or the very format of the 

experimental situation as a social variable. 135 As Bruner states, “how little we considered the 

extent to which the dialectic of the culture could itself give shape to how one chose to 

construct a version of the self extended over a lifetime.” 136 Wittgensteinian understandings of 

language as a game and the role of such game playing when persons created documents are 

missing from the kinds of analyses which Allport offered in the UPD. 137 The absence of these 

concerns however does not vitiate the UPD’s distinctive voice in its own day. 

Fifthly, I cannot avoid mention of Allport’s frequently-noted distaste for psychoanalytic 

approaches to personality. His antipathy may have influenced the UPD’s earnest quest for 

methodological alternatives to a pervasive Freudian influence in the interpretation of personal 

documentary materials from the 1920s onward. 138 Surely his classification of Freud as an 

example of an “uncritical” user of personal documents demonstrated Allport’s continuing 

refusal to regard psychoanalysis as scientific. 

Finally, we may be approaching a time in which it is possible to reassess Allport in a 

truly comprehensive fashion. Perhaps someone may begin work in the near future on that full 

biography of this central actor which the history of psychology lacks to its obvious detriment. 

In pursuing this research, I became aware of a growing sense of admiration for Allport. His 

writing demonstrates a felicity of expression which I envy. His archived papers en masse detail 

an individual who committed extraordinary energies at an exhausting pace on behalf of so 

many who sought his help. His rhetoric still retains a punch after more than half a century. 

And, his defense of the individual as inviolable continues to caution psychologists who mistake 

their data for the individual person whom they are studying. Researchers could do far worse 

than to begin to read again or for the first time the professional and personal documents of 

Allport’s own life. 

1 Gordon W. Allport, “Gordon W. Allport,“ in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol. 5, eds. 

Edwin G. Boring and Gardner Lindzey (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), pp. 3-25. This essay 

also is reprinted in Gordon W. Allport, The Person in Psychology: Selected Essays by Gordon W. Allport 

(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 376-409. Given his deep interest in the development of the 

individual person across the lifespan, it is ironic that no substantial biography of Gordon W. Allport 

(henceforth, GWA) has appeared in years since his death. Thomas F. Pettigrew’s obituary of GWA [first 

published as “Gordon Willard Allport. 1897-1967,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 12 

(1969): 1-5] is reprinted with longer interviews of GWA in Richard I. Evans, Gordon Allport: The Man 

and His Ideas (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970). Calvin S. Hall and Gardner Lindzey provide an excellent 

older introduction in their textbook, Theories of Personality (2 nd ed.) (New York: John Wiley and Sons: 

1970), pp. 258-297. Alvin H. Smith offers a helpful illustrated biographical essay, “Gordon W. Allport: A 

Becoming Personality,” pp. 356-363, in A Pictorial History of Psychology ed. Wolfgang G. Bringmann, 

Helmut E. Lück, Rudolf Miller, and Charles E. Early (Chicago: Quintessence Publishing Co., 1997). 

Shorter biographical references include “Allport, Gordon Willard,” in Biographical Dictionary of 

Psychology eds. Noel P. Sheehy, Antony J. Chapman, and Wendy A. Conroy (London/New York: 

Routledge, 1997), pp. 9-11 and Phillip E. Vernon, “Allport, Gordon Willard (1897-1967)” in Encyclopedia 

of Psychology, Vol. 4, ed. Raymond J. Corsini (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994, 2 nd ed.), p. 4. 



16 

Colleagues, students, and researchers offer helpful biographical glimpses of GWA among the essays in 

Kenneth H. Craik, Robert Hogan, and Raymond N. Wolfe (eds.), Fifty Years of Personality Psychology 

(New York: Plenum Press, 1993). Biographical details of Allport’s earlier years are scattered throughout 

Ian A. M. Nicholson, “Gordon Allport, Character and ‘the Culture of Personality,’ 1897-1937,” History of 

Psychology 1 (1998): 52-68. 

2 Allport, 1967, p. 10. See, too, an appreciation of Stern in Gordon W. Allport, “The Personalistic 

Psychology of William Stern,” in Historical Roots of Contemporary Psychology ed. Benjamin B. Wolman 

(New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 321-337. 

3 Gordon W. Allport, “The Study of the Undivided Personality,” Journal of Abnormal and Social 

Psychology 19 (1924): 132-142. 

4 See Gordon W. Allport, “The Study of Personality by the Intuitive Method. An Experiment in Teaching 

from The Locomotive God,” Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology 24 (1929): 14-27; “The 

Psychologist’s Frame of Reference,” Psychological Bulletin 37 (1940): 1-28; and “The General and the 

Unique in Psychological Science,” Journal of Personality 30 (1962): 405-422. 

5 Allport in Evans, 1967, p. 18. 

6 Walter Mischel, “Looking for Personality” in A Century of Psychology as Science, eds. Sigmund Koch 

and Dennis E. Leary (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985, reprinted 1992), 515-526. 

7 Allport, 1967, p. 3. 

8 Gordon W. Allport, The Use of Personal Documents in Psychological Science: Prepared for the 

Committee on Appraisal of Research. Bulletin #49 (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1942). 

This monograph was subsequently reprinted in 1951. Henceforth, cited as UPD. 

9 UPD, p. xii. 

10 A frequency count by decade of the 198 items in the UPD bibliography suggests the recency of the 

literature reviewed. Item counts (percentages) show 1932-1941: 106 items (53.5%); 1922-1931: 60 

(30.3%); 1912-1921: 11 (5.6%); 1902-1911: 11 (5.6%); prior to 1902: 8 (4%); no date: 1 (0.5%); 

and, in press: 1 (0.5%) 

11 UPD, p. 148. 

12 UPD, p. 191 

13 Ken Plummer, Documents of Life: An Introduction to the Problems and Literature of a Humanistic 

Method (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), p. 35; Jennifer Platt, A History of Sociological Research 

Methods in America, 1920-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 146; Lawrence S. 

Wrightsman, “Allport’s Personal Documents: Then and Now,” pp. 165-166 in Craik et al., 1993. 

14 Lawrence S. Wrightsman, “Personal Documents as Data in Conceptualizing Adult Personality 

Development,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 7 (1991): 367-385; Wrightsman, 1993. Note 

that the papers in Craik et al., 1993, were originally presented at a conference in 1987. 

15 See James H Capshew, Psychologists on the March: Science, Practice, and Professional Identity in 

America, 1929-1969 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Ellen Herman, The Romance of 

American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley, CA: University of California 

Press, 1995). 

16 See Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge, 

UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and his Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language 

(London: Sage Publications, 1997). An understanding of the forces shaping American psychology 

receives sophisticated and integrated treatment in Roger Smith, The Norton History of the Human 

Sciences (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). Dorothy Ross links the development of the 

social sciences in the U.S. from the early 19 th century up to 1929 to their involvement in “the classical 

ideology of liberal individualism” and “the national identity of American exceptionalism” in The Origins of 

American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. xiii, xiv. Other analyses of 

these forces are found in James H. Capshew, “Psychologists on Site: A Reconnaissance of the 

Historiography of the Laboratory,” American Psychologist 47 (1992): 132-142; Jill G. Morawski (ed.), 

The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); Jill 

G. Morawski, “Educating the Emotions: Academic Psychology, Textbooks, and the Psychology Industry, 

1890-1940,” pp. 217-244 in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in 

America eds. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); and Michael 



17 

M. Sokal (ed.), Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890-1930 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers 

University Press, 1987). Capshew, 1999, provides a detailed appreciation of the background and role of 

psychologists during the Second World War in shaping the post-war discipline. Analyses of post-war 

trends are also found in Herman, 1995, and Phillip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing 

America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995). 

17 Letter of January 25, 1940 from Carroll T. Pratt to Gordon W. Allport (henceforth, GWA). Papers of 

Gordon W. Allport. HUG 4118.50, Box 4, Folder 135 “Presidential Speeches.” Harvard University 

Archives (henceforth, HUA). John Gilbert Beebe-Center, a Harvard colleague of Allport, was himself an 

experimental psychologist who published several papers with S. S. Stevens, one of Allport’s fiercest 

methodological critics. 

18 Contemporary critiques of positivism and the theoretical foundations of the social sciences (especially 

psychology) can be found in works such as Sacha Bem and Huib Looren de Jong, Theoretical Issues in 

Psychology: An Introduction (London, Sage Publications, 1997); Brent D. Slife and Richard N. Williams, 

What’s Behind the Research? Discovering Hidden Assumptions in the Behavioral Sciences (Thousand 

Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995); M. Brewster Smith, “Psychology and the Decline of Positivism: The Case for a 

Human Science,” pp. 53-69 in Perspectives on Behavioral Science: The Colorado Lectures ed. Richard 

Jessor (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991); and Jonathan A. Smith, Rom Harré, and Luk Van 

Langenhove (eds.), Rethinking Psychology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995). References to alternative 

perspectives in psychology (including narrative, discursive, and cultural psychology) include Jerome S. 

Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) and his “The Narrative 

Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1-21; Michael Cole, Cultural Psychology: A Once and 

Future Discipline (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1996); Rom Harré and 

Grant Gillett, The Discursive Mind (London, Sage Publications, 1994); Vincent W. Hevern, Resources for 

Narrative Psychology: Guide and Annotated Bibliography (Online; Syracuse, NY; Available on the WWW 

at http://maple.lemoyne.edu/~hevern/narpsych.html); George S. Howard, “Culture Tales: A Narrative 

Approach to Thinking, Cross-Cultural Psychology and Psychotherapy,” American Psychologist 46 (1991): 

187-197; Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (New 

York: William Morrow, 1993); Theodore R. Sarbin (ed.), Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of 

Human Conduct (New York: Praeger, 1986); and James W. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, and Gilbert 

Herdt (eds.), Cultural Psychology: Essays on Human Development (New York: Cambridge University 

Press, 1990). 

19 The cultural aspirations of psychological science in the 19 th century and earlier receives fine 

explication in Gustav Jahoda, Crossroads Between Culture and Mind: Continuities and Change in 

Theories of Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Wundt’s “second 

psychology” and its modern status is described by Emily D. Cahan and Sheldon H. White, “Proposals for 

a Second Psychology,” American Psychologist 47 (1992): 224-235. Contemporary concerns with 

biographical and life history data have been detailed by Amia Lieblich, Rivka Tuval-Mashiach, and Tamar 

Zilber, Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 

Publications, 1998); Louis M. Smith, “Biographical Methods,” pp. 286-305, and D. Jean Clandinin and F. 

Michael Connelly, “Personal Experience Methods,” pp. 413-427 in Handbook of Qualitative Research, 

eds. Normal K. Denzin and Yvonna Y. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994); Plummer, 

1983; and William McK. Runyan, Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations in Theory and 

Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 

20 Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xi-xii. See, 

too, Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 

Press, 1986) and his subsequent study, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and 

Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) for an understanding of the emerging 

scientific production of knowledge in modern Western culture. 

21 Quoted by Zunz, p. 36. Day was the original chair of the Committee on Appraisal of Research (CAR) 

which sponsored Allport’s monograph. Following work at the Rockefeller Foundation, Day was 

successively Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and President of Cornell University. 

22 Zunz, pp. 36-39. The history of the LSRM can be found in Martin Bulmer and Joan Bulmer, 

“Philanthropy and Social Science in the 1920s: Beardsley Ruml and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller 

Memorial, 1922-29,” Minerva 19 (1981), 347-407. A helpful overview of the role of philanthropic and 

other sources of funding in the social sciences, particularly sociology, is found in Chapter 5 (“Funding 

and Research Methods,” pp. 142-199) of Platt, 1996. Other research includes David C. Hammack and 

Stanton Wheeler, Social Science in the Making: Essays on the Russell Sage Foundation, 1907-1972 



18 

(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994); Barry D. Karl and Stanley N. Katz, “The American Private 

Philanthropic Foundation and the Public Sphere, 1890-1930,” Minerva 19 (1981): 251-257; and Ross, 

1991, pp. 400-407. Ross, 1991, points out that in just one seven-year period (1922-1929), the LSRM 

and SSRC “dispensed about forty-one million dollars to American social science, social work, and their 

institutions” (p. 402). A contended thesis linking the Rockefeller Foundation to specific programmatic 

decisions of the SSRC is advanced by Donald Fisher, “The Role of Philanthropic Foundations in the 

Reproduction and Production of Hegemony: The Rockefeller Foundations and the Social Sciences,” 

Journal of the British Sociological Association 17 (May, 1983): 206-233 His analysis is challenged by 

Martin Bulmer, “Philanthropic Foundations and the Development of the Social Sciences in the Early 

Twentieth Century: A Reply to Donald Fisher,” Sociology, 18 (November 1984): 572-578 and Salma 

Ahmad, “American Foundations and the Development of the Social Sciences between the Wars: 

Comment on the Debate between Martin Bulmer and Donald Fisher,” Sociology 25 (1991): 511-520. 

23 Donald Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the 

United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1993). 

Fisher’s is the first major reexamination of the SSRC since the opening of the organization’s archives to 

outsider researchers. See, too, Kenneth Prewett, “A Brief History of the SSRC,” (on-line, no date, 

downloaded July 30, 1999, available on the WWW at http://www.ssrc.org/histbri.htm). Also, “Social 

Science Research Council Archives, 1924-1990” (on-line at the Rockefeller Archives Center [RAC], no 

date; downloaded July 1, 1999, available on the WWW at 

http://www.rockefeller.edu/archive.ctr/ssrc.html). Prewett observes that “the Council would deal only 

with such problems as involve two or more disciplines” in order to achieve a “cross-fertilization of the 

social disciplines.” The constituent societies of the SSRC in the late 1930s were the American 

Anthropological Association, American Economic Association, American Historical Association, American 

Political Science Association, American Psychological Association, American Sociological Society, and 

American Statistical Association. 

24 See especially Fisher, 1993, chapter 6 (pp. 199-227) for an overall view of the SSRC’s impact. In 

pursuing research, the central Policies and Procedures Committee (PPC) of the SSRC normally appointed 

freestanding committees of academics; in turn, these committees initiated, supervised, and evaluated 

specific research studies according to the mandate (and funding) given by the PPC and reported their 

results back to the both the PPC and the Council itself 

25 Ibid. 

26 Prewett, loc. cit. 

27 Fisher, 1993, p. 206. Stuart A. Rice (ed.) Methods in Social Science: A Case Book (Chicago, IL: 

University of Chicago Press, 1931). See Ross, 1991, pp. 401-402 for a discussion of SSRC work on 

methodology in the 1920s. Prewett, loc. cit., points out that the singular “Method” of the committee’s 

title became the plural “Methods” of their book’s title. 

28 Fisher, 1993, pp. 204-205. 

29 Fisher, 1993, pp. 167-172. Fisher sets this debate within the context of both personality and 

management struggles within the Council, especially regarding SSRC Executive Director Robert T. Crane 

and the imminent end of Rockefeller financial support in 1940. 

30 Fisher, 1993, p. 171. Siding with Bulmer and Bulmer, 1981, Platt, 1996, strenuously disagrees with 

Fisher’s 1993 thesis that Rockefeller philanthropy directly influenced the specific topics and strategies 

adopted by the SSRC. 

31 Fisher, 1993, pp. 172-178, reviews the origins, content, and impact of Wirth’s report. Quotation from 

the CRCP’s report to the Council is given by Fisher, p. 175. 

32 Fisher, 1993, p. 176. 

33 PPC Minutes, September 15, 1937. In Record Group: Committee on Appraisal, 1937-46; Series I. 

Committee Reports. Box 118, Folder 638, Various Minutes of CAR, SSRC Archives (RAC), p. 6. The 

primary archival record of the CAR is found in this folder, #638, in Box 118. It consists of a single bound 

volume in which both complete and excerpted agenda, reports, and Minutes of meetings of the CAR, 

PPC, and the Council itself – all as they relate to the CAR – have been grouped together chronologically 

to form a sequential narrative of the CAR’s functioning; this volume will be cited henceforth as Various 

Minutes of the CAR. 

34 Nourse is quoted by Fisher, 1993, p. 177. 



19 

35 PPC Minutes, December 12, 1937, Various Minutes of the CAR, pp. 7-10. This discussion generated 

one of the longest set of minutes found among the records of the CAR. Fears resurfaced at this meeting 

which had been voiced initially in the debate founding the CAR and would be echoed in later years, 

namely, that appraisals of significant social science research would result in nothing more than “glorified 

book reviews” (ibid., p. 8). One respondent countered that such an outcome might be salutary, given 

the sorry state of book reviewing in the social sciences generally. 

36 Day was succeeded by Robert Redfield as CAR Chairman in 1939. PPC Minutes, April 14, 1939, 

Various Minutes of the CAR, p. 20. 

37 PPC Minutes, January 28, 1940, Various Minutes of the CAR, p. 32. The formal expansion of the CAR’s 

mandate came two months later (PPC Minutes, March 15, 1940, Various Minutes of the CAR, p. 33). 

38 Council Minutes, April 2, 1938, Various Minutes of the CAR, p. 11. 

39 The decision to seek a review is documented in the CAR Meeting Minutes, April 3, 1938, Various 

Minutes of the CAR, p. 81. The two proposed psychology texts were Louis L. Thurstone, The Vectors of 

Mind: Multiple-Factor Analysis for the Isolation of Primary Traits (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago 

Press, 1935) and Gordon W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Henry Holt 

and Co., 1937). The inability to reach a decision was announced by Poffenberger to the Council at its 

Fall meeting (Council Minutes, September 13-15, 1938, Various Minutes of the CAR, p. 14). 

40 William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. (Boston, MA: 

Gorham Press, Vols. I and II, 1918; Vol. III, 1919; Vols. IV and V, 1920; New York: Knopf, two volume 

ed., 1927). Herbert Blumer, An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and 

America. Bulletin 44. (New York: Social Science Council, 1939). 

41 A transcript of deliberations at this conference was incorporated along with Blumer’s appraisal and 

issued as a single SSRC bulletin (Blumer, 1939). 

42 CAR Meeting Minutes, July 28, 1940, Various Minutes of the CAR, p. 89. In the UPD, Allport is quite 

sensitive to Blumer’s analysis and responds to that critique at several points, e.g., pp. 147, 151 and the 

entire Chapter 12, “The Problem of Conceptualization.” He also cites his own experience in his justcompleted 

analyses of the autobiographies of German refugees: “none of the major conclusions of the 

study were anticipated in the pre-arranged schedule for analysis—proof that it is possible for the 

investigator to take from personal documents more than he puts in.” (UPD, p. 82). He is referring to 

Gordon W. Allport, Jerome S. Bruner, and E. M. Jandorf, “Personality under Social Catastrophe: Ninety 

Life-histories of the Nazi Revolution,” Character and Personality 10 (1941): 1-22. 

43 Council Minutes, September 10-12, 1940, Various Minutes of the CAR, pp. 37-41. The quote is found 

on p. 40. The undated memorandum of Burgess to which Redfield refers in his statement to the Council 

(p. 39) is “The Use of the Personal Document in Sociology” in Various Minutes of the CAR, pp. 93-100, 

where it is appended to the CAR meeting Minutes of October 20, 1940. The research under review was 

Robert C. Angell, The Family Encounters the Depression (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1936). 

44 CAR Meeting Minutes, October 20, 1940, Various Minutes of the CAR, pp. 90-92. 

45 CAR Meeting Minutes, November 10, 1940, Various Minutes of the CAR, pp. 101-103. 

46 Nicholson, 1998. Ian Nicholson, “Moral Projects and Disciplinary Practices: Gordon Allport and the 

Development of American Personality Psychology (Ph.D. Dissertation, York University, 1996). For an 

more focused analysis of the Allportian value system’s impact upon his earliest course in personality 

theory, see Ian A. M. Nicholson, “To ‘Correlate Psychology and Social Ethics’: Gordon Allport and the 

First Course in American Personality Psychology,” Journal of Personality 65 (1997): 733-742. 

47 Nicholson, 1998, see especially pp. 60-63. 

48 Allport, 1937, especially Chapter 8 “The Mature Personality” (pp. 213-231). 

49 Letter of Jerome S. Bruner to author, dated 4 March 1999. 

50 UPD, p. 148. 

51 UPD, p. 161. 

52 UPD, p. 132. Emphasis in the original. 

53 UPD, p. 182. 



20 

54 Katherine Pandora, Rebels within the Ranks: Psychologists’ Critique of Scientific Authority and 

Democratic Realities in New Deal America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 

55 Ibid., esp. pp. 111-118. 

56 Ibid., p. 3. 

57 Ibid., esp. pp. 61-75; 84-89. 

58 “Critical Report on S. S. R. C. Monograph Predictions of Personal Adjustment,” submitted to Dr. 

Robert T. Crane, June 2, 1941 in Papers of GWA, HUG4118.50, Box 3, Folder 94. HUA. Quote from p. 4 

of manuscript. Emphasis in the original. The monograph was published as Paul Horts, Paul Walling, and 

Louis Guttman (eds.), The Prediction of Personal Adjustment: A Survey of Logical Problems and 

Research Techniques. Bulletin 48. (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1941) 

59 Letter of October 1, 1941 by GWA to Robert T. Crane. Papers of GWA in Box 3, Folder 94 (Committee 

on Appraisal 1941). HUG4118.50. HUA; UPD, p. 156. 

60 Zunz, 1999, p. 68. 

61 “Psychology in the Near Future.” HUG4118.60. Box 3, Folder 87. HUA. Pandora, 1997, is uncertain 

about the dating of his speech and indicated it was either 1940 or 1941 (see her endnote #52, p. 188). 

While the manuscript itself is undated, a copy of the dated program (“Program of the 75 th Anniversary 

New England Intercollegiate Conference on Psychology, University of New Hampshire.”) is located in the 

same folder as the text in the HUA and secures 1941 as the year of its presentation. 

62 “Psychology in the Near Future,” p. 11a. In line with the practice of his generation, Allport almost 

always employs the masculine pronoun in reference to the anonymous other. I’ve not altered these uses 

in most cases though I recognize that they do sound jarring to present day ears. 

63 UPD, p. 149. 

64 Important expressions of experimental operationism in psychology to which Allport responded 

included Arthur G. Bills, “Changing Views of Psychology as Science,” Psychological Review 45 (1938): 

377-394; Clark L. Hull, “Mind, Mechanism, and Adaptive Behavior,” Psychological Review 44 (1937): 1- 

32; Stanley S. Stevens, “Psychology and the Science of Science,” Psychological Bulletin 36 (1939): 221- 

263; and Edward C. Tolman, “The Determination of Behavior by Stimuli-Past and To Come,” 

Psychological Review 45 (1938): 1-41. Bills’ 1938 paper challenged Allport directly in its famous 

definition of psychology as science: “At present the following criteria are widely accepted: that 

psychology as science is empirical, mechanistic, quantitative, nomothetic, analytic, and operational” (p. 

377). Allport’s direct response is found in his presidential address (see Note #74 below). 

65 Until 1937, APA presidential addresses appeared in the Psychological Review. Subsequently they were 

published in the Psychological Bulletin. Both journals, though, printed them as the first article of a new 

volume. 

66 Louis L. Thurstone, “The Vectors of Mind,” Psychological Review 41 (1934): 1-32; Joseph Peterson, 

“Aspects of Learning,” Psychological Review 42 (1935): 1-27; Hull, 1937; Tolman, 1938; and John 

Frederick Dashiell, “Some Rapproachement in Contemporary Psychology,” Psychological Bulletin 36 

(1939): 1-24. 

67 Karl E. Scheibe, “Metamorphoses in the Psychologist’s Advantage,” in The Rise of Experimentation in 

American Psychology, ed. Jill G. Morawski (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 63. 

68 Allport, 1940. He delivered this address on September 7, 1939. 

69 Allport, 1940, p. 12. 

70 The research underlying Allport’s empirical analysis in his 1939 presidential address is detailed in 

Jerome S. Bruner and Gordon W. Allport, “Fifty Years of Change in American Psychology,” Psychological 

Bulletin 37 (1940): 757-776. 

71 Ibid., p. 22. 

72 Allport’s decision to cite Jaensch may have been a purposely satiric one grounded in a knowledge that 

the German’s experimental animal research work was used to justify Nazi racial policies. For example, 

see E. R. Jaensch, Der Huehnerhof als Forschungs- und Aufklaerungsmittel in menschlichen 

Rassenfragen. [The Chicken Yard as a Medium for Research and Explanation of Human Race Problems]. 

(Berlin: Verlag Paul Parey, 1939). 



21 

73 Allport, 1940, p. 26. 

74 Ibid. Emphases are in the original. See Bills, 1938, above. 

75 Nicole B. Barenbaum, “The Case(s) of Gordon Allport,” Journal of Personality 65 (1997): 743-755. 

Barenbaum cites several critics who take Allport to task; these include D. Capps, “An Allportian Analysis 

of Augustine,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 4 (1994): 205-228; Robert R. Holt, 

Methods in Clinical Psychology (New York: Plenum, 1978); and Christopher Peterson, Personality (San 

Diego: Harcourt, Brace, 1988). The published case study by Allport is found in his Letters from Jenny 

(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965). David G. Winter offers a crucial analysis of this work and its 

origins in “Gordon Allport and ‘Letters from Jenny’,” in Craik et al., 1993, pp. 147-163. 

76 Nicole Barenbaum, “ ‘The Most Revealing Method of All’: Gordon Allport and Case Studies.” Paper 

presented at the annual meeting of Cheiron, Richmond, VA, June 19, 1997. She cites several published 

studies: A. L. Baldwin, “The Statistical Analysis of the Structure of a Single Personality,” Psychological 

Bulletin 37 (1940): 518-519; A. L. Baldwin, “Personal Structure Analysis: A Statistical Method for 

Investigating the Single Personality,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 37 (1942); D. Cartright 

and J. R. P. French, “The Reliability of Life-History Studies,” Character and Personality, 8, 110-119; and, 

Norman A. Polansky, “How Shall A Life-History Be Written?,” Character and Personality 9 (1941): 188- 

207. 

77 Letter of March 4, 1999 by Jerome S. Bruner to author. He also remembered “…that seminar…was 

made up of a bunch of strong-minded graduate students, much as he describes them in his (1967) 

autobiography.” 

78 William Ellery Leonard, The Locomotive-God (New York: Century Co., 1927). Leonard died on May 2, 

1944 at age 68. He was a poet and widely published scholar of English and Latin literature. His obituary 

appeared in the New York Herald Tribune, May 3, 1944, where he is cited for his Locomotive God and 

Two Lives: A Poem (privately printed in 1923; New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1925). 

79 Letter of April 5, 1928 by G.W.A. to Professor W. E. Leonard. Papers of GWA. HUG4118.50. Box 2, 

Folder 56. W. E. Leonard: Correspondence and Misc. Material. HUA. 

80 Ibid. The compendium of Leitfragen included 128 items geared to the 19 chapters of the Locomotive 

God. A mimeographed copy of this 17-page listing, entitled “Case Study #1. The Locomotive God by 

William Ellery Leonard. Questions for Consideration,” is found in Papers of G.W.A. HUG4118.50. Box 2, 

Folder 57. W. E. Leonard: Locomotive God. HUA. 

81 The article appeared a year later as Allport, 1929. 

82 Letter of January 6, 1938 by GWA to Professor W. E. Leonard. Papers of GWA. HUG4118.50. Box 2, 

Folder 56. W. E. Leonard: Correspondence and Misc. Material. HUA. In a close reading of archival and 

published sources, Nicole Barenbaum argues that Allport’s changing understanding of Leonard’s case in 

the late 1920s and 1930s reveals a transition from the behavioral orientation of his doctoral thesis to 

the concept of “functional autonomy” of his classic personality text (Nichole Barenbaum, “From Habits 

To Functional Autonomy: Gordon Allport And The Locomotive-God.” Paper presented at the symposium 

“The Allport Brothers” at the meeting of the Canadian Psychological Association, Toronto, June 12, 

1997.) 

83 Case of M.B. “Repression or Shell Shock.” Folder 50; Case of “Miller.” Folder 52.; Case of “Johnny 

Rocco.” Folder 54; H. G. Wells: Experiment in Autobiography. “Questions for Discussion.” Psychology 

16b 1937-1938. Folder 55. These are all found in Papers of GWA HUG4118.50. Box 2. HUA. Jean Evans 

originally published two separate case studies which Allport used in class: Jean Evans, “Johnny Rocco,” 

Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 43 (1948): 357-383 and “Miller: A Case Report,” Journal of 

Abnormal and Social Psychology 45 (1950): 359-479. She later published these and another case jointly 

in Jean Evans, Three Men: An Experiment in the Biography of Emotion (New York: Knopf, 1954) for 

which Allport wrote an introduction. Wells’ text appeared as H. G. (Herbert George) Wells, Experiment in 

Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (New York: The Macmillan 

Company, 1934). 

84 Allport’s pedagogy is detailed by one of his Radcliffe College students, Pauline B. Hahn, “Johnny 

Rocco—Teaching Material for Elementary Students,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 43 

(1948): 384-390. 

85 UPD, p. 63, emphasis in original. A contemporary exemplum of Allport’s claim is illustrated in two 

highly acclaimed works of Louis A. Sass which employ the personal writings of schizophrenics: Madness 



22 

and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

University Press, 1994) and The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber and the Schizophrenic 

Mind (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 

86 UPD, p. 48. 

87 UPD, p. 51. 

88 Report of the Committee on Displaced Foreign Psychologists (CDFP), p. 718, in “Proceedings of the 

Forty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Inc., Pennsylvania State 

College, September 4, 5, 6, 7, 1940,” Psychological Bulletin 37 (1940): 699-741. 

89 An annual report of the CDFP was submitted to the APA between 1939-1942: Psychological Bulletin 36 

(1939), pp. 761-765; 37 (1940), pp. 715-718; 38 (1941), pp. 843-844; 39 (1942), pp. 733-734. 

90 Report of the CDFP in Psychological Bulletin 36 (1939), p. 761. 

91 James T. Lamiell, “William Stern: More Than ‘The IQ Guy’,” in Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, 

Volume II, eds. Gregory A. Kimble, C. Alan Boneau, and Michael Wertheimer (Washington, DC: 

American Psychological Association and Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), pp. 73-85. 

92 Letter of September 17, 1937 by Charlotte Bühler to GWA. Papers of GWA. HUG4118.10. 

Miscellaneous Correspondence 1930-1945. Box 1. Folder: Bühler, Karl & Charlotte. HUA. 

93 Detailed correspondence exists among the GWA papers in which Allport took a lead in sponsoring 

Stern’s entrance to the U.S. and in coping with an escalating set of requests by Charlotte Bühler who 

had some difficulty coping with American cultural norms vis-à-vis the professorate. See Papers of GWA. 

HUG4118.10. Miscellaneous Correspondence 1930-1945. Box 10. Folder: Stern, William, Gunther, and 

Clara and the Bühler folder previously cited. HUA. 

94 Among notes Allport used for a March 30, 1961 talk before the Harvard Historians on the “Origins of 

Contemporary American Psychology,” he described his text in personality as “half German, half 

American” and joked it “belongs in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean”. He also noted that the highly 

European study of “Characterology” might not be a “major school” but it was “of chief interest to me.” 

HUG4118.60. Box 3. Folder 89, p. 6. HUA. 

95 “Psychology in the Near Future,” p. 14. 

96 Allport, 1937, esp. pp. 227-231, 395-398. 

97 Letter of December 17, 1940 by A. T. Poffenberger (henceforth, ATP) to GWA. Papers of GWA, in Box 

3, Folder 94 (Committee on Appraisal 1941) HUG4118.50. HUA. 

98 Letter of December 23, 1940 by GWA to ATP. Papers of GWA in Box 3, Folder 94 (Committee on 

Appraisal 1941). HUG4118.50. HUA. (Underlining in the original.) 

99 Letter of January 10, 1941 by ATP to GWA. Papers of GWA in Box 3, Folder 94 (Committee on 

Appraisal 1941). HUG4118.50. HUA. 

100 Letter of January 13, 1941 by GWA to ATP. Papers of GWA in Box 3, Folder 94 (Committee on 


101 Letter of February 11, 1941 by ATP to GWA. Papers of GWA in Box 3, Folder 94 (Committee on 


102 Letter of March 6, 1941 by GWA to ATP. Papers of GWA in Box 3, Folder 94 (Committee on Appraisal 

1941). HUG4118.50. HUA. 

103 Letter of March 11, 1951 by ATP to GWA. Papers of GWA in Box 3, Folder 94 (Committee on 


104 Letter of May 28, 1941 by GWA to ATP. Papers of GWA in Box 8. HUG4118.10. HUA. 

105 “Guide for Study of Personal Documents,” found in Papers of GWA, Box 3, Folder 94. HUG4118.50. 

HUA. Quote is from Allport, 1941, p. xv. 

106 Letter of May 28, 1941 by GWA to ATP. Papers of GWA in Box 8. HUG4118.10. HUA. 

107 Undated draft letter by GWA to ATP. Papers of GWA, Box 3, Folder 94, HUG4118.50. HUA. The dating 

of this letter is probably early in April, 1941 since Poffenberger replied to GWA on April 11, 1941 

acknowledging Allport’s progress report: “I am not surprised that the job turned out to be bigger than 



23 

you anticipated” and assuring him that an October 1 submission would be okay. This letter resides 

immediately following the undated draft of GWA in the HUA. 

108 Karl M. Dallbach, “The Emergency Committee in Psychology, National Research Council,” American 

Journal of Psychology 59 (1946): 496-582. “Report of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of 

the National Research Council,” Psychological Bulletin 30 (1941): 871-872. Capshew, 1999, discusses 

the mobilization of psychology for war work at length. Ladislas Farago and L. F. Gittler, German 

Psychological Warfare: Survey and Bibliography (New York: Committee for National Morale, June 1941). 

Farago alone edited the revised second edition of this volume which appeared soon afterward in 

September 1941. 

109 Capshew, 1999, p. 117. 

110 “Psychology in the Near Future.” 

111 Letter of August 8, 1941 by Ernest W. Burgess to GWA. Papers of GWA. Box 3, Folder 94. 

HUG4118.50. HUA. 

112 An undated 3-page manuscript beginning “Stauffer’s (sic) paper is the most lucid…” and covered with 

multiple corrections in Allport’s hand is found in the Papers of GWA, Box 3, Folder 94, HUG4118.50. 

HUA. This manuscript clearly refers to the text of Samuel A. Stouffer, “Notes on the Case-Study and the 

Unique Case,” Sociometry 4 (1941): 349-357. That same journal number contains the two other papers: 

Ernest W. Burgess, “An Experiment in the Standardization of the Case-Study Method,” pp. 329-348, and 

Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., “The Case-Study Method in Prediction,” pp. 358-370. 

113 Letter of October 2, 1941 by George A. Lundberg to GWA. Papers of GWA. Box 3, Folder 94. 

HUG4118.50. HUA. Lundberg’s paper appeared as “Case-Studies vs. Statistical Methods—An Issue 

Based on Misunderstanding,” Sociometry 4 (1941): 379-383. 

114 Letter of October 1, 1941 by GWA to Crane. Papers of GWA. Box 3, Folder 94. HUG4118.50. HUA. 

115 Letter of October 17, 1941 by ATP to GWA. Papers of GWA. Box 8. Folder P. HUG4118.10. HUA. 

116 Letter of October 27, 1941 by Edwin G. Nourse to GWA. Papers of GWA. Box 8, Folder N. 

HUG4118.10. Correspondence, 1930-1945. HUA. 

117 Minutes of PPC Meeting, October 25, 1941, Various Minutes of the CAR, p. 46. 

118 Council Agenda, March 28-29, 1942. Various Minutes of the CAR, p. 47. Louis R. Gottschalk, Clyde 

Kluckhohn, and Robert C. Angell, The Use of Personal Documents in History, Anthropology, and 

Sociology. Bulletin No. 53 (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1945). 

119 Council Minutes, March 28-29, 1942, Various Minutes of the CAR, p. 48. 

120 Council Agenda for September 11-13, 1945, Appendix 11, Various Minutes of the CAR, p. 73. 

121 Council Agenda for September 9-11, 1941, Various Minutes of the CAR, p., 45 

122 The reviews included those by Emory S. Bogardus in Sociology and Social Research 26 (1942): 482; 

Peter Hampton in the Journal of General Psychology 30 (1944): 277-283; George A. Lundberg in 

Sociometry 5 (1942): 317; Robert E. Park in the American Sociological Review 7 (1942): 435-437; and 

Ralph K. White in the American Journal of Psychology 57 (1944): 590-593. 

123 Hampton, 1944, p. 277. 

124 The presentiment in Hampton’s 1944 review of Bruner’s 1990 argument for the importance of 

verisimilitude in narrative qualitative research projects is striking. 

125 White, 1944, p. 590. 

126 Bogardus, 1942. 

127 Park, 1942, p. 436. 

128 Lundberg, 1942. The case method critique is found in Lundberg, 1941. 

129 Letter of October 18, 1941 by GWA to ATP. Box 8. Folder P. HUG4118.10. HUA. 

130 Ibid. 

131 Letter of October 1, 1941 of GWA to Robert T. Crane. Papers of GWA. Box 3, Folder 94. HUG4118.50. 

HUA. 



24 

132 Letter of November 3, 1941 by GWA to Edwin G. Nourse. Papers of GWA. Box 8, Folder N. 

HUG4118.10. Correspondence 1930-1945. HUA. 

133 See Danziger, 1997, esp. pp. 158-180. 

134 Robert R. Holt, “Individuality and Generalization in the Psychology of Personality,” Journal of 

Personality 30 (1962): 377-404. Allport’s “reply” came in “The General and the Unique in Psychological 

Science,” pp. 405-422. The “debate” was the product of juxtaposing two independent submissions 

which, the journal’s editor noted, “[did] not represent a knowing dialogue between the authors.” (p. 

376). 

135 Missing from the UPD’s list of references is the work by Saul Rosenzweig, “The Experimental 

Situation as a Psychological Problem,” Psychological Review, 40 (1933): 337-354. Allport had cited this 

study in his 1937 Personality text but missed the larger point that experiments are themselves social 

situations inviting analysis and not simply higher degrees of control. 

136 Letter of Jerome Bruner to author, March 4, 1999. 

137 Bem & Looren de Jong (1997); Pauline M. Rosenau, Post-modernism and the Social Sciences: 

Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 

138 Allport’s attitudes toward Freud are documented in Allport’s “Autobiography,” 1967, esp. p. 8; Nevitt 

Sanford, “What Have We Learned About Personality,” in Koch and Leary (1985), pp. 490-514; and David 

G. Winter, “Allport’s Life and Allport’s Psychology,” Journal of Personality 65 (1997): 723-731. The 

pervasive influence of psychoanalytic theorizing in the study of biographical data after the First World 

War is well documented in John A. Garraty, “The Interrelations of Psychology and Biography,” 

Psychological Bulletin 51 (1954): 569-582. See, too, Ann Douglas’ persuasive intellectual history, 

Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), for an 

appreciation of the profound cultural impact of Freudian thought on the 1920s and beyond.

Use of Personal Documents - Le Moyne - Le Moyne College

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