Louis Wirth was born August 28, 1897, in Gümenden in the Rhineland district of Germany. Wirth's family was a relatively prosperous family of the Jewish community in their small village. The Wirths were cattle merchants and farmers as were most Jews in the rural areas of Rhineland and Westphalia. Gümenden was a small rural community of only about nine hundred people. Wirth immigrated to United States in 1911, when his mother's brother visited the Wirth family in rural Germany. Wirth's uncle offered to take Wirth and an older sister back to America. Wirth's mother had high educational aspirations for her children, and she welcomed the opportunity to send Wirth and his sister to America to pursue educational opportunities. In America, Wirth lived first in Omaha, Nebraska. Wirth left Omaha after winning a regional scholarship to study at the University of Chicago. His intellectual pursuits were deeply influenced by University of Chicago sociology faculty including Robert Park and Ernest Burgess. After his undergraduate degree, Wirth became the director of the division of delinquent boys for the Bureau of Personal Service of the Jewish Charities of Chicago.
Wirth married Mary Bolton, a University of Chicago trained social worker, in 1923. Soon after his marriage, Wirth returned to University of Chicago to pursue his graduate degree in sociology. His doctoral dissertation The Ghetto, a study of the Jewish community, was completed in 1925. A classic in ethnic studies, Wirth traced the segregation of Jewish communities from self-isolation in late antiquity to the Middle Ages when Jews were required under law to live in segregated areas and up to the contemporary Jewish community in Chicago. He first held a temporary teaching position at the University of Chicago and then at a brief appointment at Tulane University after receiving his doctorate. A fellowship from the Social Science Research Council allowed him to travel through Europe with his family during 1931. On his travels, he saw the presence of Nazis in Germany becoming more pronounced. On his return to America, Wirth began the necessary steps to bring his family to America.
From 1932 to 1937, the Wirth family resettled in America. When Wirth returned to America in 1931, he also joined the sociology faculty at the University of Chicago under the chairmanship of Park. His intellectual pursuits during his long tenure at Chicago included involvement in community affairs in Chicago, sociology of knowledge, sociological theory, and urban sociology. He was politically and intellectually interested in the improvement of urban living conditions and minority rights. Wirth was appointed the president of the American Sociological Association in 1946. He also helped to establish the International Sociological Association and became its first president in 1950. He died suddenly on May 10, 1952, in Buffalo, New York, after speaking at a conference on community relations.
Although Wirth spent many of his early years in rural environments in both Germany and Nebraska, Wirth's writings on urban life became classics of in the field of urban sociology. In Urbanism as a Way of Life (1938), Wirth proclaimed that urbanism is the prevailing way of life in modern society. Wirth defined a city as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of heterogeneous people. Wirth theorized that physical features of the city (size, density, and heterogeneity) have profoundly changed both the urbanite and the nature of interpersonal relationships. Due to city size people cannot possibly know all other urbanites. Out of necessity, there is a shift away from primary relationships to secondary relationships. Urbanites interact with others not as individuals but with others in certain roles. For example, an urban dweller deals with many people in the course of the day such as the deli cashier and the doorman of his or her apartment building. The urbanite does not develop deep personal connections with these people but only interacts with them in terms of their roles. Personal relations become superficial and transitory. Urban life is marked by utilitarianism and efficiency. The density of living and heterogeneity of urban residents leads people to live in homogenous groups resulting in a "mosaic of social worlds" in a city. Transitions across groups are difficult, and numerous social orders result adding to the segmentation of urban life.
This is the complete article, containing 698 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
