Father of the Man. by W. Allison Davis; Robert J. HavighurstReview by: Ellsworth FarisAmerican Journal of Sociology, Vol. 53, No. 5 (Mar., 1948), pp. 401-402Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2771488 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 40I

ferred to the work of the Beards on American social history and then given much more in- formation about the course of our educational development.

On the whole, it is a very enlightened, in- forming, and progressive work; but it is more realistic and daring with respect to economic and social history than in regard to education and contemporary problems. For a realistic ac- count of the relation between education and cur- rent social issues, one will find more of relevance in Jesse H. Newlon's Education for Democracy in Our Time; Howard D. Langford's Education and the Social Conflict; and the Fifteenth Year Book of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association: The Im- provement of Education. In the book under re- view we find a maximum of rich material as to the social situation which our education faces, with a minimum of information and suggestions as to what education proposes to do about this social situation.

HARRY ELMER BARNES Cooperstown, N.Y.

Father of the Man. By W. ALLISON DAVIS and ROBERT J. HAVIGHURST. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., I947. Pp. viii+245. $2.75.

This little book is the result of a study of two hundred and two families, white and Negro. Fifty of each race are "middle class," and fifty- one of each are called "lower class" or "working class" or "slum dwellers." The lower class is as- sumed to have a "culture" of its own which is compared and contrasted with the middle-class "culture" in the methods of training children, with especial reference to weaning and toilet training. Seven of the case studies are briefly set forth to illustrate the condusions.

The middle class seems to come out second best on many counts. One such family ("the Bretts") is described rather satirically, and it is found that middle-class parents train their chil- dren too much, make arbitrary and unjust de- mands, forbid fighting, sexual exploration, and the breaking of school windows. Described as most arbitrary and unjust is the demand that the children are expected to learn the behavior and goals of their own society.

By contrast, the slum children live a happier life. "The Washingtons" are a family with eleven children, living in the slums. The slum child

gets more "organic pleasure" out of life, has less chance of going hungry (sic), has a closer and more intelligent relation to the mother, is less frustrated in his psychological responses and is spared the prolonged guilt feelings which mid- dle-class parents seek to arouse and maintain. The child is encouraged to fight his brothers and thus escapes the "false peace" of the middle class. Mary is keeping a record of the number of people murdered in her block and knows one man who has been charged by the police with eleven murders. She envies her sister Hazel, who carries a knife to use on her rivals in love. Little Paulette has often seen Hazel and her boy friend having sex relations in the front room. Her fam- ily had a good laugh when her uncle gave his wife a whipping for a Mother's Day present. The children will probably have "motivations" which some people "stigmatize" as shiftlessness, irresponsibility, ignorance, and immorality, but the authors insist that the advantages are not wholly on the side of the middle class.

In trying to make a case for the slum "cul- ture," the book almost goes too far and the reader begins to doubt the wisdom of the plans for slum clearance if the children are so happy there. Of course, much of what is here called "culture" is termed disorganization in the vo- cabulary of the sociologist. Were the slum- dwellers alone on some island, the case would be different, but in Chicago there are churches, schools, truant officers, visiting nurses, juvenile courts, and probation officers and these reach into the slums. Delinquency, theft, and murder are violations of the mores and the laws, and men of good will seek to abolish the slum "cul- ture" by doing away with the slums.

Toilet training is the subject of one chapter, but in no less than eleven chapters is the sub- ject dwelt upon. The subject of soiled diapers can grow monotonous, and, though there is some cautious advice given, the middle-class parents will probably continue to take the advice of the physician.

The weakest point is the central contention that the child is motivated only by fear of pun- ishment and hope of reward. The experiments of Watson in which children burned their fingers in a candle flame a hundred times before they ceased reaching should completely negate this oversimplification. An acquaintance with the literature would have revealed scores of tribes and many middle-class families where no pun- ishment is inflicted and parental love is never

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402 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

withdrawn. Authentic literature exists describ- ing the way in which, in a primary group rela- tion, oral communication results in self-stimu- lation and response, whereby attitudes are transmitted and acquired.

There is a chapter on heredity, with the con- clusion that heredity does "enter into a vast number of human characteristics; just how, and in what proportion, is not known." There is also a chapter on language, mostly commonplaces with a few minor inaccuracies.

The style is enlivened by some amusing rhetorical figures. Here are some samples: "Age is the ladder by which the young child hopes to climb to his Arcadia." "Learning social and personal control is the quintessence of becoming a human being." "Lunging and panting they (the children) throw their very bodies against the ramparts of age-privilege." And this culi- nary metaphor: "Our methods of weaning re- sult from a mixture of superstitions larded with social conventions and basted with practical horse sense." The modesty of the authors is evi- dent in this sentence: "The early training of a child is an unknown country in whose recesses the origin of personality is still lost." And finally the optimism is evident when they say: "In spite of his stupidity and vices, man remains the hope of the world."

The book is, as they say on the radio, a brave try; the reviewer would re-echo the words of the announcer: "Better luck next time."

ELLSWORTH FARIS

University of Chicago

The Engineer in Society. By JOHN MILLS. New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., I946. Pp. xx+ I96. $2.50.

"Happy the man whose work is his hobby." Happier still, at the hour of retirement, if the man has speculated, with a good stock of gen- eral ideas, upon the happy combination. For then he can give the fruit of his experience to his younger colleagues, not as mellow anecdotes but as an incisive analysis of their common profes- sion. And, in so doing, he may follow his work- hobby after he has, because of having'attained "later maturity," been locked out of the labora- tory or office where the material paraphernalia of his trade are kept. This book is such fruit, shared by a man who has had a creative career

in pursuing and directing research for the tele- phone industry.

What Mr. Mills has written is a sort of career manual for research engineers in industry. It is very like another recent book, The Way of an Investigator, written by Dr. Walter B. Cannon after retirement from a long career of research in physiology. The books are alike in their em- phasis upon ideas as the mainspring of creative research and upon the proper writing of reports and in their warning that continued creative- ness depends upon maintaining good relations with one's colleagues and upon understanding the social matrix in which one's work is done. They are both dealing with the career contin- gencies of their professions and doing it almost as incisively as, although less systematically than, Max Weber did it in Wissenschaft als Beruf.

Mills has some things to say about the engi- neer in the larger society-his politics, his knowledge of the world, his naivete on social and economic matters. But the society to which he devotes most attention, and of which he gives the most skilful analysis, is the immediate social matrix in which the research engineer operates -the industrial organization. He evidently be- lieves that the engineer must understand and learn to manipulate this society before he can take much of a place in the bigger world. The two problems to which he gives most thought and space are (i) the selection of research men (and the other side of it, the individual's choice of this career) and (2) the contingencies of the research career in industrial organizations.

In the first problem he stresses a distinction between the man to whom the company and the favorable judgment of his close and equal col- leagues are meat and drink and the man who is oriented to superiors and subordinates. The first is the potential research man. On another axis, he notes that some minds love, and start with, comparisons and generalizations, proceed- ing from there to the details of experiment and solution of particular problems; others work in the opposite direction. Again, the former is the potential research man; the latter, in both cases, should look toward executive work. The importance of these propositions is that they relate not to individual aptitudes, in the psy- chological sense, but to the social orientation of the personality.

The chief career contingency analyzed by Mills is that which arises from the fact that the industrial research scientist or engineer does his

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