James McKeen Cattell, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Academic ...

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successive editions of the American Men of Science directories, and for many
years controlled the affairs of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS). 17
Scholarship on Cattell’s life and career over the past 30 years has emphasized
his achievements. However, it has also shown that he often exhibited a selfrighteous
egotism that led him to expect others to defer to his views. Cattell never
hesitated to act on his self-righteousness. Indeed, as he told a fellow psychologist
in 1903, he never “object[ed] to a fight in a good cause” and he always “regard[ed]
any cause for which [he] did fight as good.” 18 To Cattell, all was black or white,
and he always knew which was which.
This attitude (and actions that expressed it) often alienated those around him,
and in many ways they limited (and at times even overshadowed) his accomplishments.
Previous scholarship has offered a range of interpretations for his
attitudes and behavior, relating them always to his status as the eldest son of close
and wealthy family. Before audiences of humanists, Cattell has been compared
with Anson Hunter, the fictional protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, 1922 story,
“The Rich Boy,” who found that his friends’ parents “were vaguely excited when
their own children were asked to [his] house,” and even as a child he noticed “the
half-grudging American deference that was paid to him.” 19 Cattell experienced
much the same attention—both within his family and from his friends’ parents—
and like any child raised within a given setting, he took it for granted. Instead, he
grew to expect this deference as his due. Like Anson Hunter, Cattell “accepted
this as the natural state of affairs” and thus developed “a sort of impatience with
all groups of which he was not the center . . . which remained with him for the rest
of his life.” Before audiences of psychologists, however, analogous studies have
cited early 21st-century clinicians’ readings of Cattell’s character informed by
DSM–IV classification criteria, which lead directly to a diagnosis of Narcissistic
Personality Disorder. 20 To be sure, in 1917 Cattell’s Columbia colleagues could
not consult the DSM–IV. However, one of them reported that Cattell “has no
appreciation . . . of the other side of any question” and that he “lack[ed] imaginative
sympathy enough to put himself in another man’s shoes.” 21 Another
emphasized that he had not “the least conception of how his actions strike other
people.” 22 This article starts from these portrayals of Cattell’s character, and
traces just how these traits helped shape the course of events on which it focuses.
In particular, the following analysis emphasizes just how Cattell’s character
meshed with three specific sets of his beliefs. The first, a vague commitment to
Socialist ideas, has not had much attention from either historians or psychologists.
It emerged in the mid 1880s when, as a student at the University of Leipzig,
Cattell met leaders of the German Socialist Party. However, his experiences as a
rich young man always tempered this attraction, as he then wrote, “I should be a
socialist if the company were not so bad.” 23 Years later this tempering led him to
argue that once the members of any organization (such as the AAAS) elected its
officers they should defer to them. 24 This mix of populist rhetoric and the
expectation of personal deference continually colored Cattell’s view of the world.
And through the 20th century’s first decades—when Socialists often ran serious
political campaigns, especially in New York—Cattell privately supported several
Socialist candidates. 25 More publicly, in 1912 he published “A Program of
Radical Democracy” that called for confiscatory inheritance taxes; progressive