William Isaac Thomas | Biography

William Isaac Thomas was a main contributor to the Chicago School of sociological thought, which is at the root of American sociology. He is recognized, along with Talcott Parsons and George Mead, as a founder of symbolic interactionism. Thomas, along with co-author Florian Znaniecki, published The Polish Peasant in Europe and America in 1918, a five-volume tome that was probably his most famous work. The Polish Peasant examines how immigrants adjusted to a new culture and what social factors affected the process. Thomas refused to see people as completely controlled by external social forces. While external controls provided the actor with a range of socially structured choices, the influence of these was important only to the extent that they were subjectively experienced. His concept of attitude as a predisposition of an individual to act in relation to social values, rather than as a purely psychical state, formed the rudiments of a social psychology. Patterns of an individual's attitudes made up a social personality, which helped sociologists ascertain theories of motivation.

Together, Thomas and Znaniecki emphasized the importance of incorporating both objective and subjective data into sociological study and stressed the interdependence of fact-gathering and theory. This study led to Thomas' notion of the definition of the situation, which meant that human actors, faced with an identical situation, reacted to it differently based on how each individual interpreted meanings through the filter of perceptual experience. An individual's definition of the situation was recognized as a link between subjective experience and responsive action. Social actors should be conceived of as in constant, reciprocal interaction with cultural forces and institutions. Thomas applied these ideas in the form of situational analysis to works such as Old World Traits Transplanted (1921), The Unadjusted Girl (1923), and The Child in America (1928).

Thomas criticized theories of racial and sexual differences. In Sex and Society (1907), for example, he disavowed biological theories of difference and stressed the interrelation between self and society. His development and use of typologies demonstrated his belief that there were greater differences within the races and sexes than between them. Thomas' methodological insights, applied in his work on immigrants and prostitutes, were subsequently used in studies of deviant behavior. His main career concern was with issues of social control and social change as a function of modernization and industrialization. He felt that traditional ways of social control no longer operated effectively and that sociology could be used to help identify the factors that affected social disorganization.

Thomas was born in Russell County, Virginia, on August 13, 1863. His father, Thaddeus Peter Thomas, was a rural farmer and a Methodist preacher with an intellectual bent. Young Thomas received his bachelor's degree at the University of Tennessee in 1884, where he discovered a love for academics. After teaching courses in foreign languages and natural history, Thomas studied in Germany from 1888 to 1889. It was there that his interests turned to ethnography. As soon as they became available, he enrolled in graduate courses at the first American Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He received his doctorate in 1896, began teaching there, and was awarded full professorship in 1910. Thomas married Harriet Park in 1888 and had five children, but only two survived into adulthood.

In 1918, Thomas was caught in a scandal that ended his career at the University of Chicago. He was charged with a violation of the Mann Act, which forbade transport of young women across state lines for 'immoral purposes.' He was caught in a hotel with the young wife of an army officer and arrested. The charges were eventually dropped, but he was fired from his position. Although Thomas was known for his flamboyant and unconventional ways with women, recent scholarship suggests that the arrest may have been more political than moral, due to his and Harriet's involvement with the pacifist movement at a time of war. In addition, his interest in social reform and women's issues such as suffrage and sexual freedom may have contributed to his ostracism from the Chicago School. Thomas moved to New York and then New Haven, continued his research and taught part-time, but his career as a professor never recovered. He was, however, elected to the presidency of the American Sociological Association in 1926. Thomas and Harriet divorced in 1934, and he married Dorothy Swaine in 1935. He died on December 5, 1947, at the age of 84 while living in Berkeley, California.