Robert E. Park

The Natural History of the Newspaper

The natural history of the press is a history of a surviving species. It is one of the most characteristic frutits of enlightenment, due to the extension of the opportunities of education to the masses of the population. The modern newspaper is a product of city life; it is no longer merely an organ of propaganda and opinion, but a form of popular literature. The journal of opinion was largely a business mans newspaper. The so-called independent press added to its public the so-called artisan class. The yellow press was created mainly to capture immigrants, and women. It was this increase of circulation that made the newspaper-formerly a subsidized organ of the parties-an independent business enterprise, an envelope and carrier for advertising.

Reflections on Communication and Culture

Communication like language is symbolic and impersonal, as is, for example, mathematics. It is, on the other hand, expressive and personal like music. Both forms of communication function in bringing about those understandings between individuals and peoples which are the substance-the warp and woof-of culture. The social function of communication seems to be to bring about and maintain understanding and cultural solidarity among individuals and societies. It may be contrasted with the social function of competition which is to bring about an orderly distribution and a division of labor between individuals and societies. This division of labor, so far as it is brought about by competition, involves the individuation of the competing units. Competition and communication may thus be said to suplement each other, since communication operates as an integrating and socializing principle, while competition is the principles of individuation. More specifically, communication may be said to operate in two dimensions. On the one hand, it serves to bring about a diffusion of cultural traits and so widen the cultural area within which socia relations may exist. On the other hand, communication, in so far as it brings diverse cultural influences into focus at some center of communication, like the rural village or metropolitan city, tends the bring into the common understanding new ideas-ideas that inevitably arise in the ferment, confusion, and conflict of the acculturation process. The processes of diffusion and acculturation seem to take place in the manner and under the conditions in which news is collected and diffused. It is characteristic of news that it circulates as far as its message is understood and seems important. It is probable, however, that the cinema, which circulates not news, but pictures, is more devastating in its effects upon local cultures and in bringing the widely dispersed people of the world within the influence of a single culture of civilization than is the news proper.

Mentality of Racial Hybrids

Racial hybrids are one of the natural and inevitable results of migration and the consequent mingling of divergent racial stocks. The motives bringing peoples of divergent races and cultures together are, in the first instance, economic. In the long run, economic intercouse enforces more intimate personal and cultural relations, and eventually amalgamation takes place. When the peoples involved are widely different in culture and in racial characteristics, and particularly when they are distinguished by physical marks, assimilation and amalgamation take place very slowly. When the resulting hybrid peoples exhibit physical traits that mark them off and distinguish them from both parent-stocks, the mixed bloods are likely to constitute a distinct caste or class occupying a position and status midway between the two races of which they are composed. The mixed bloods tend everywhere to be, as compared with the full bloods with whom they are identified, an intellectual and professional class. The most obvious and generally accepted explanation of the superiority of the mixed bloods is that the former are the products of two races, one of which is biologically inferior and the other biologically superior. In the case of the Negro-white hybrids in the United States, other and less obvious explanations have been offered. It has been pointed out, for example, that the mulatto is the result of a social selection which began during the period os slavery, when the dominant whites selected for their concubines the most comely, and presumably the superior, women among the Negroes. There is, however, the fact to be considered that in a society where racial distinctions are rigidly maintained, the mixed blood tends to be keenly conscious of his position. He feels, as he frequently says, the conflict of warring ancestry in his veins. The conflict of color is embodied, so to speak, in his person. His minds is the melting pot in which the lower and the higher cultures meet and fuse.

Urbanization as Measured by Newspaper Circulation

This paper is predicated on the assumption that culture, since it is based finally on communication, is always more or less a local phenomenon. In so far as this assumption is valid, every community having its own local tradition and its own institutions may be regarded as a cultural unit. The cultural and political organization of the community invariably tends to conform, and when the community achieves a stable organization it will conform to the economic. Changes in economic relations, under these circumstances, may be accepted as a index of changes that are taking place or impending in cultural life. Recent studies indicate that within the limits of the metropolitan areas of great cities, a process of devolution is going on. Changes in the metropolitan areas of great cities are identical in kind with the changes that are taking place whole region which the metropolis, with is satellites, dominates. Business and industry is moving out to the smaller cities, increasing their population to be sure, but changing still more their character and function. The smaller cities are beginning to assume the role of the larger urban centers. The changes which are taking place are embodied, on the one hand, in the concentration of individual business units, as, for example, in our chain store; on the other hand, as represented in our chain store in an orderly dispersion of these units throughout the whole metropolitan area. This process of devolution, therefore, is not so complete as to impair the organization which was achieved through the movement toward concentration and consolidation. Though the units are dispersed, financial control and administrative organization remains at the center. The changes taking place are really in the direction of a more complete and more efficient organization. In the small towns or villages the population is stationary and they are losing their original character as independent units. They are, in short, becoming satellites of the small cities. All of these changes are very accurately reflected in newspaper circulation.

Physics and Society

Some seventy years ago, sixty-eight, to be exact, Walter Bagehot published a notable little volume entitled Physics and Politics , described in a subtitle as “Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of ‘Natural Selection’ and ‘Inheritance’ to Political Society.” Actually the volume sought to sketch in outline a natural history of political society, and to describe the process or processes by which later, more elaborate, and more liberal forms of association have emerged, from the dissolution of earlier, simpler, and more rigid, if not oppressive, forms. Society, or at least political society, as Bagehot conceived it, is a kind of super-organism, having a social structure which is maintained by a social process. This structure is imbedded in and cemented by custom. Man is a custom-making animal. The process in this instance which is not otherwise defined, is what we know elsewhere as “the historical process.” Its function is to weave and reweave the web of custom and tradition in which the individuals who are destined to live together and eventually act together as a political unit, are ineluctably bound together. Always there is a more or less inflexible tradition which imposes upon each new generation the pattern of the inherited social order. But always there are the liberating and individuating influences of other social processes—competition, conflict, and discussion—which represent what Bagehot describes as mans “propensity to variation,” or, to use a political rather than a biological term, his propensity for non-conformity, “which,” he adds, “is the principle of progress.”

Sociology and the Social Sciences: The Social Organism and the Collective Mind

The problem of the social organism, inherited from Comte and Spencer, is the rock upon which the modern schools of sociology have split. Society is composed of parts that have the power of independent locomotion. The fundamental problem of sociology is how to conceive the relations between the parts in such a way as to explain the fact that societies do behave as units. This is the problem of social control. Just as psychology is an account of the manner in which the individual organism exercises control over its parts or rather of the manner in which these parts co-operate to carry a corporate existence, so sociology is a point of view and method for investigating the processes by which individuals are inducted into and induced to co-operate in some sort of corporate existence which we call society. Sociology is the science of collective behavior.

Community Organization and the Romantic Temper

This article by R.Park is notorious for his famous ability - to transcend from setting the fundamental theoretical questions to their manifestations in real social problems naturally and by the shortestpass. The political system is based on the assumption that the local community is a local political entity. If the local community is organized, aware of their local interests, and has its own opinion, then we have the most thriving democracy. There is evidence that fifty percent of voters in the country do not enjoy their right to vote. If this is any indication of indifference to the interests of the local community, while at the same time, it can be considered a measure of the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the local community. In this case we are talking about the problems of immigrant communities. Park finds out what community is and what is its organization. He tries to assess the competence and efficiency of the community is different from the competence and efficiency of its constituent individuals. In a sense, these communities, where immigrants live their lives, can be seen as a model for society as a whole.

Negro Home Life and Standards of Living

Before the Civil War there were, generally speaking, two classes of Negroes in the United States, namely free Negroes and slaves. After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plantation Negroes remained, for the most part, upon the soil and formed a class of peasant farmers. This class, which represented 80 per cent of the race, constituted the base of the social structure, so far as such a thing may be said to have existed at that time, among the members of the race. Above this there was a small class composed in part of free Negroes, in part of a class of favored slaves, all those in fact whom education, opportunity or natural ability had given material advantages and a superior social position. It was this class which took the leadership directly after the war. In recent years the number of occupations in which Negroes

Industrial Fatigue and Group Morale

Studies in the nature of fatigue led to similar inquiry in regard to monotony and to the question of morale, more specifically industrial morale. What is needed to sustain morale is a body of industrial folkways. The modern factory is not a society. Industrial fatigue and lack of morale are due to some interference or failure to preserve the organic and social balance. What is true with regard to industry applies also to industrial civilization generally. Increasing mobility and industrial expansion have broken up the traditional order and have not permitted the establishing of a new one. The ills of modern industrial civilization are cultural, not political, and are incident to the existing industrial regime.

Murder and the Case Study Method

Andreas Bjerre, author of the volume, The Psychology of Murder, has worked out a method of study of criminal types based upon his prolonged, intimate, and first hand investigations of individual criminals. In this volume, in which he reports upon his observations and interpretations of three typical cases, he makes some very interesting comments upon his methods. This paper is an abstract of the introduction to a paper entitled The Psychology of Murder. The chief interest in this volume to students of criminology and human nature generally is undoubtedly the unique methods employed for the analysis, description, and classification of personality types. These methods are different from but not wholly unlike those employed by Thomas and Znaniecki in their studies of the Polish Peasant.