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American Social Science Association (ASSA)
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The American Social Science Association (ASSA) was an association of American social reformers and researchers that existed between 1865 and 1909. The "Mother of Associations", the ASSA spawned numerous reform societies on charities, prisons, education, etc., as well as professional associations of historians (AHA), economists (AEA), social scientists (AAPSS), sociologists (ASA), and political scientists (APSA).
Up until the 1870s, economics, and the social sciences in general, had been largely the province of amateur researchers and social reform activists. The earliest American association in the social sciences (generally speaking) was the American Statistical Association (founded 1839). The ASA had been modeled after the Statistical Society of London, where researchers and activists could present and share empirical data on social phenomena they were investigating, advise each other on methods and lobby governments to undertake more systematic collection of data.
Mass immigration, industrialization and rapid urbanization in the 1850s brought up a series of social problems in many northeastern US cities - poverty, disease, crime, etc. Municipal governments, gripped by battles for patronage between gangs of politicians, were largely inattentive. As an industrial laboring class and indigent underclass grew, cities went practically ungoverned. A number of voluntary private charities had emerged in response to the rising urban problems, but found themselves overwhelmed. The disparate collection of philanthropic charities, uncoordinated and unsystematic, had only a partial or superficial understanding of the dimensions, causes and remedies of the social problems they were trying to address. Despite the presence of elite names in philanthropic ranks, they had little ability to influence unresponsive local governments and legislatures, which continued to be primarily guided by vested interests. This began to change with the end of the Civil War. Many activists who had been previously involved with the abolitionist movement, such as Franklin B. Sanborn, Samuel G. Howe, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison, re-directed their energies and organizing skills to the urban charity movement.
The ASSA was originally founded in Boston in 1865 by a group of Massachusetts charities, under the title "American Association for the Promotion of Social Science" (soon renamed "Social Science Association"). It was modeled on an equivalent British society, the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS) founded by Henry Brougham in 1857. Neither the NAPSS in Britain nor the ASSA in the US were academic-oriented institutions. Rather, they were designed as networks of social reformers, usually educated upper and middle classes, of various backgrounds (teachers, charity workers, ministers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, businessmen, government officials, etc.). The associations put them in touch with each other in order to communicate research in social problems, and into contact with politicians to coordinate a variety of social reforms and bring them into legislation, e.g. on public health, sanitation, education, prisons, etc.
The idea for the ASSA was launched by the Board of State Charities of Massachusetts (est. 1862, by Sanborn, Howe and others), which issued a circular letter on August 2, 1865 calling for the establishment of an organization:
"object shall be the discussion of those questions relating to the the sanitary condition of the people, the relief, employment and education of the poor, the prevention of crime, the amelioration of criminal law, the discipline of prisons, the remedial treatment of the insane and those numerous matters of statistical and philanthropic interest which are included under the general head of 'social science'" (Massachusetts Board circular, 1865, Documents, p.10)
The ASSA was formally founded at a conference on October 4, 1865 at the Boston State House presided over by Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew, and attended by several hundred figures which read like a "who's who" of the activist and academic elite from the Boston area (minutes) A constitution was adopted and MIT founder William B. Rogers was elected the first president of the ASSA, and Samuel Eliot and Franklin Sanborn as secretaries. Journalist Henry Villard was appointed permanent secretary in 1868..
The idea of "social science" at this time was still inchoate. Previous work on economics and social theory in the 1830s and 1840s tended to be sweeping and abstract rather than particular and concrete. They contemplated man and society in some ideal philosophical sense, or on an vast historical-civilizational scope, rather than upon current observation of what was actually there. Driven by hypothetical models rather than detailed data, contemporary economics had few specific applications. As a result, what passed for economic policy primarily addressed grand themes such as the trade, currency, population, etc., mostly from a general perspective. Moreover, much of conventional economic theory had been constructed in the early 19th Century, before the industrial revolution had really taken wing, and as a result economic models did not handle mass industrialization and the rise of the industrial working classes very well. Unlike the socialists, the social reformers in the ASSA were not opposed to the new industrial capitalist order, nor did they seek to change it in any fundamental way, but merely to introduce humanitarian "cures" to some of its social side-effects. A good part of this mission was focused on education - not only educating the poor to improve their habits and integrate them in mainstream American society, but also educating those who minister to the poor, and educating legislators.. Behind this effort was the implicit notion that there was such a thing as a "science of society" that could be discovered, taught and applied to current social problems. The social reformers of the ASSA had their critics, not only on the socialist left (who saw them nearly as apologists for the system), but also on the right - notably the social darwinist followers of Herbert Spencer - who mocked their "social science" and decried their meddling (cf. PSM, 1874. p.367).
The ASSA defined "social science" as the science of "man as a social being", to be conducted by "collecting facts, applying principles and reaching the general laws which govern the social relations". Its initial scope covered education, health, poverty and crime, the main focus of the urban charities. (1869 note). Accordingly, in 1865 the ASSA initially established four "departments" (it originally planned six, but reduced them to four under the short labels of "Education", "Health", Finance" and "Jurisprudence"; see coverage in 1865 declaration, p.15; "Finance" was shorthand for "Economy, Trade and Finance"). It was envisioned that the chairmanship of each departments would to be headed by a professional practitioner - a college professor in Education, a physician in Health, a judge or lawyer in Jurisprudence, but Finance was a little trickier, as economists were not quite professionalized yet. The initial 1865 configuration of departments was "Education" (under Harvard president Thomas Hill), "Health" (under abolitionist S.G. Howe), "Finance" (under Yale president Theodore Dwight Woolsey) and "Jurisprudence" (under jurist and ex-Columbia economist Francis Lieber).
ASSA members were expected to enroll in one of the four (later five) departments. All members annually elected the General Committee, which in turn appointed the Department Committees.. The "Executive Committee" consisted of the general officers plus the department chairs, which met monthly in Boston. In its early years, ASSA membership fees were $5 and numbers fluctuated wildly.
The ASSA's objectives were "first, to gather all the information within reach, both at home and abroad, with regard to social science, both at home and abroad, in all its branches; and second, to diffuse this information through and beyond our country". The means of dissemination was through conferences and (to a lesser extent) the sponsoring of public lectures and publications. For the first fifteen years, the ASSA held two conferences per year - the small "annual meeting" (usually held in Boston in January, mostly for association business), and the "general meeting", a large conference held either in the Spring or Fall, in various US cities (from 1880, both the annual meeting and general conference were held together). Conference attendees came mostly from New England-New York area. For a quarter of a century, between 1876 and 1899, the ASSA general conference was held almost invariably in Saratoga, a small resort town in upstate New York. Papers, studies and proposals were usually presented at the general meeting, although occasional papers were presented in the Boston annual meeting and local chapter meetings (notably Philadelphia) Proceedings of the ASSA meetings were originally published in the Journal of Social Science, launched in 1869. The JSS was not quite a journal with outside submissions, but rather an annual volume that merely reprinted the conference papers.
The ASSA had tremendous growing pains. After an initial flurry of activity, interest began to fade and the association began to drift. After the energetic Villard resigned as secretary in 1870, he was not replaced and membership and conference attendance dropped dramatically, to the point where no meetings were called in 1871 and 1872. A Philadelphia social science association, founded in 1869 under William Strong, remained active, held monthly meetings and soon outnumbered the national association in Boston. The national ASSA was saved from dissolution in November 1872 by the efforts of Boston philanthropist James M. Barnard and Harvard academics Louis Agassiz and Benjamin Pierce. The ASSA was reorganized and revitalized. Civil service reformer George W. Curtis was made president, and former abolitionist Franklin Sanborn took over the reigns of permanent secretary. Membership began to increase again, and hovered around 300 thereafter.
The success of Philadelphia forced the ASSA to look beyond New England and take local branches more seriously. Recognizing that social legislation in the United States tended to happen at the municipal and state level, rather than the federal, the ASSA set up a process for the easier formation of local branches after 1872. Branches were soon set up in Detroit, St. Louis, San Francisco, Galveston and elsewhere. Directorships in the national ASSA were expanded to include more persons from the Midwest, West and South, and national conferences were even held in Detroit (1875) and Cincinnati (1878), before the Saratoga custom imposed itself.
The most significant change post-1872 was the increasing interest by academics in the ASSA and its decided turn towards greater professionalism. This was a novelty. In 1870, social sciences were largely unknown and absent from American universities, which up until then was dominated by classical curriculums taught by clerical professors, with only a dab of economics in the final year "moral philosophy" lectures, usually delivered by the president. But starting in the early 1870s, electives in the social sciences began being introduced in university curriculums and professorships in political economy started being established. The spearhead of these changes were led by reformist university presidents, many of whom were active in the ASSA, especially after 1872. This includes Daniel Coit Gilman (then at Berkeley, soon Johns Hopkins), Andrew Dickson White of Cornell, Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, Theodore Dwight Woolsey of Yale, Frederick Barnard of Columbia, James McCosh of Princeton, E. Benjamin Andrews of Brown, Martin B. Anderson of Rochester and, of course, William B. Rogers of MIT.
The transition in social science from amateurs to professionals is reflected inside the ASSA after 1872, when academics began to take charge of the departments - e.g. C.W. Eliot took over "Education", Emory Washburn over "Jurisprudence", etc. . The moribund "Finance" section was split into two departments in 1874 - "Finance" (under David A. Welles, then W.G. Sumner from 1875) and "Social Economy" (under W.B. Rogers), bringing the number of departments in the ASSA to five. Economists of the time (e.g. David A. Wells, Arthur L. Perry, Francis Lieber, Amasa Walker, Francis A. Walker, William Graham Sumner, Edward Atkinson) tended to concentrate in the "Finance" department, leaving "Social Economy" to the social activists.
The ASSA spawned numerous social reform organizations, such as the National Prison Association (1870), the National Conference of Charities (1874) and the American Health Association (1874), which often met in parallel sessions at Saratoga or other venues. But by the late 1870s, as the academics took control, the papers presented at the main conference began becoming increasingly theoretical, dealing with general policy questions, like trade, currency and taxation, without attachment to any particular social reform cause. By the early 1880s, the "Finance" section of the ASSA was essentially a scientific association of professional economists.
The big thing of the ASSA was its annual national conference, where people from all over the country met. In the 1880s, as social scientists were finally setting themselves up in universities as professional academics, it quickly dawned that this was a unique opportunity for holding parallel conferences on more exclusively academic topics they were researching. The Johns Hopkins academics were the first to part ways and use the annual ASSA meeting to set up exclusive sessions for themselves, without the confusing hoi polloi of amateurs. The historians, under Herbert Baxter Adams, defected first, founding the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1884. This was followed up by the economists, under Richard T. Ely, who founded the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1886. These moves had encouraged by Hopkins president Gilman as a way to raise Hopkins's national profile.
The Penn economists (James, Patten) actually protested the creation of the AEA. They disliked the professional character of the AEA and the segregation of economics from the other social sciences. They urged economists should stay under the "Economics" and "Finance" sections of the ASSA meetings as the best avenue to fulfill its social reform function. They saw the AHA & AEA defections as a Hopkins-engineered gambit to take over the profession. As the ASSA was impotent to prevent it, and hobbled as a result, the Penn economists struck out on their own and founded their own association, more in line with the original open ASSA spirit. The Philadelphia branch of the ASSA was one of the more active branches anyway, so it was not too hard to elevate that branch into a new American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS, f.1889).
Further specialization in the late 1890s and early 1900s finally separated economics from sociology from political science, and professors in the latter wanted their own professional association. The political scientists formed their own American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1903, and the sociologists formed the American Sociological Society (now ASA) in 1905. With the academics all gone into their own associations, the ASSA was hallowed out, and basically wound up by 1909.
The current mid-winter meetings of the AEA are held under an umbrella
called "Allied Social Science Association" (ASSA). This is
unrelated to the original ASSA, but the choice of acronym, if not
deliberate, is a fortuitous coincidence. It is right and proper
that the the current meetings still evoke the memory of the great
Saratoga meetings of the American Social Science Association, the mother
of them all.
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