The first noteworthy Chicago study was The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, now generally forgotten but regarded by sociologists as a landmark that blended empirical data and generalisation. W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki spent several months in Poland, then followed thousands of Polish immigrants to America, examining the same people on both sides of the Atlantic. They gained access to private correspondence, archives from the Bureau of Immigration, and newspaper archives to produce as complete a picture as possible of the whole migration experience. That was followed by a series of Chicago studies which examined various ‘discontents’ of the age, or symptoms of it – The Gang, by Frederic Thrasher, in 1927; The Ghetto, by Louis Wirth, Suicide, by Ruth Shonle Cavan, and The Strike, by E. T. Hiller, all published in 1928; and Organised Crime in Chicago, by John Landesco, released in 1929. Much of this research was directly related to policy – helping Chicago reduce crime or suicide, or get the gangs off the streets. Park always worked with a local community committee to ensure his studies chimed with the real concerns of local people. But the importance of Chicago sociology, which exerted its greatest influence between 1918 and 1935, had as much to do with the development of survey techniques, nondirective interviewing, and attitude measurement, all of which were intended to produce more psychological ways of grouping people, going beyond the picture painted in bland government censuses.51
The most significant Chicago survey was an examination of the discontent that most maimed American civilisation (a rival even to the unemployment caused by the Great Depression): race. In 1931 Charles Johnson published The Negro in American Civilisation and for the first time froze a statistical picture of the black American against which his progress, or lack of it, could be measured.52 Johnson was actually on the faculty of Fisk University when the book came out, but he had trained under Park and, in 1922, published The Negro in Chicago as one of the sociology department’s series of studies.53 Johnson, more than anyone else, helped create the Harlem Renaissance and believed that if the American Negro could not achieve equality or respect in any other way, he should exploit the arts. Throughout the 1920s, Johnson had edited the New York magazine for blacks, Opportunity, but toward the end of the decade he returned to academia. The subtitle of his new book was ‘A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations in the Light of Social Research,’ and the research element was its strong point. The book, the most thorough analysis of Negro status yet produced, compiled government records and reports, health and crime statistics, charts, tables, graphs, and lists. At that time, many blacks – called Negroes then – could remember slavery, and some had fought in the Civil War.
The statistics showed that the lives of blacks had improved. Illiteracy had been reduced among Negroes from 70 percent in 1880 to 22.9 percent in 1920. But of course that compared very badly, still, with the white illiteracy rate of 4.1 percent in 1920.54 The number of lynchings was down from 155 in 1892 to 57 in 1920 and 8 in 1928, the first time it had fallen to single figures. But eight lynchings a year was still a fearful statistic.55 More enlightening, perhaps, was the revealing way in which prejudices had evolved. For example, it was widely assumed that there was so pronounced a susceptibility among Negroes to tuberculosis that expenditures for preventive or corrective measures were practically useless. At the same time, it was believed that Negroes had a corresponding immunity to such diseases as cancer, malaria, and diabetes, so that no special measures of relief were necessary. It did not go unnoticed among Negroes that the majority opinion always interpreted the evidence to the minorities’ disadvantage.56 What Johnson’s survey also showed, however, and for the first time in a thorough way, was that many social factors, rather than race per se, predetermined health. In one survey of fifteen cities, including New York, Louisville and Memphis, the population density of Negroes was never less than that for whites, and on occasions four times as high.57 Mortality rates for Negroes in fifteen states were always higher than for whites, and in some cases twice as high. What emerged from the statistics was a picture that would become familiar – Negroes were beginning to occupy the inner-city areas, where the houses were smaller, less well built, and had fewer amenities. Already there were differences in what was then called ‘law observance.’58 A survey of ten cities – Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, and others – showed Negroes as two to five times as likely to be arrested as whites, though they were three and a half times less likely to be sentenced to a year or more in prison. Whatever was being shown here, it wasn’t a biological propensity on the part of Negroes to commit violence, as many whites argued.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s chapter in Johnson’s book repeated his argument that the supposed biological differences between the races must be ignored. Instead attention should be focused on the sociological statistics – now amply widened – which disclosed the effects of discrimination on the status of the Negro. The statistics were particularly useful, he said, in the realm of education. In 1931 there were 19,000 black college students compared with 1,000 in 1900, 2,000 black bachelors of arts compared with 150. Those figures nailed the view that Negroes could never benefit from education.59 Du Bois never wavered from his position that the obsession with biological and psychological differences was a device for prejudiced whites to deny the very real sociological differences between races, for which they – the whites – were largely to blame. Herbert Miller, a sociologist from Ohio State University, felt that the tighter controls on immigration introduced in the 1920s had ‘profoundly affected race relations by substituting the Negro for the European’ as the object of discrimination.60 The long-term message of The Negro in American Civilisation was not optimistic, confounding America’s view of itself as a place where everything is possible.
Charles Johnson, the black, urban, sophisticated polymath and star of the Harlem Renaissance, could not have been more different from William Faulkner, a rural, white monomaniac (in the nicest sense) from the Deep South. Between 1929 and 1936 Faulkner produced his four masterpieces, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), the last two of which specifically confront the issue of black and white.
Faulkner, who lived in Oxford, Mississippi, was obsessed by the South, its obsession with itself and with its history, what his biographer called ‘the great discovery.’61 For Faulkner the South’s defeat in the Civil War had trapped it in the past. He realised that whereas most of America was an optimistic country without much of a past, and with immigrants forever reshaping the present, the South was a very different enclave, almost the opposite of the thrusting North and West Coast. Faulkner wanted to explain the South to itself, to recreate its past in an imaginative way, to describe the discontents of a civilisation that had been superseded but refused to let go. All his great books about the South concern proud dynastical families, the artificial, arbitrary settings in which barriers are forever being transgressed, in particular those of class, sex, and race. Families are either on the rise or on the wane, and in the background is shame, incest, and in the case of Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! miscegenation. These unions raise passions, violent passions, death and suicide, frustrating dynastic ambitions.