Lester Frank Ward

Most, if not all of what is known about Ward's early life comes from the definitive biography, Lester F. Ward: A Personal Sketch,[3] written by Emily Palmer Cape in 1922, where she writes in the foreword:

For several years I was closely associated with Dr. Ward as co-editor of his work entitled, Glimpses of the Cosmos,[4] 6 volumes published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London, 1913: Comprising his minor contributions and biographical and historical sketches of all his writings. Month after month I worked with him. We went through all his personal papers. I found in the wonderful and beautiful friendship thus developed a revelation of qualities of mind and heart which could be perceived only through intimate and harmonious relations. Naturally I learned much of the man and of his life. He often told me : "No one has ever gone over every detail of my life's journey as you have."

Cape explained later in the foreword:

There is an important fact which must be explained so that those who know and admire his work may appreciate why the following sketch is not so complete as I hoped it might be. Ward had the habit of keeping a diary. This was to him one of the most important matters of his life. Never did a day pass but a few lines were inscribed. No matter how tired he was at night, always before retiring he would note down his doings of the day.

In a footnote on pp. 5–6, Cape notes: On February 20, 1911, in replying to my asking him to write his autobiography, he says: "I don't want to write my autobiography and have it appear while I am alive. It doesn't seem the thing to do. You are the one to write my biography from all the data that I shall leave, but it will be done after I have left them." (The "data" signified the diaries. The above italics are in Dr. Ward's letter.)[3]

When serious illness took him from his University duties, he wrote me of his having to leave Providence and asked me to meet him at the station on his arrival in New York. Never shall I forget that early morning when he arrived. He was so weak that I asked: "May I not go on to Washington with you? I fear to have you go alone." But he said No, that when rested he would feel better, and could go on very well by himself. He grew better as we chatted, and asked me to open his satchel so that he could hand me a bundle of papers and letters he wanted to give me. Then he said: "I hope to return soon, but you know where all my papers, diaries, and letters are, and what to do with them at any time." I did not like to talk of these things then. When the train time came he seemed much brighter and bade me adieu. After a few weeks of severe illness in Washington, where he had gone to the home of his wife, who had been an invalid for some time, he passed away.

Research career and U.S. Geologic Survey

Ward never practiced law, however, and concentrated on his work as a researcher for the federal government. At that time almost all of the basic research in such fields as geography, paleontology, archaeology and anthropology were concentrated in Washington, DC, and a job as a federal government scientist was a prestigious and influential position. In 1883 he was made Geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey.

While he worked at the Geological Survey he became good friends with John Wesley Powell, the powerful and influential second director of the US Geological Survey (1881–1894) and the director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution.

Ward and fossil tree trunks

By the early 1880s, the new field of sociology had become dominated by ideologues of the left and right, both determined to claim "the science of society" as their own. The champion of the conservatives and businessmen was Herbert Spencer; he was opposed on the left by Karl Marx. Although Spencer and Marx disagreed about many things, they were similar in that their systems were static: they both claimed to have divined the immutable stages of development that a society went through and they both taught that mankind was essentially helpless before the force of evolution.

With the publication of the two-volume, 1,200-page, Dynamic Sociology: Or Applied Social Science as Based Upon Statistical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences (1883), Lester Ward hoped to restore the central importance of experimentation and the scientific method to the field of sociology. For Ward science wasn't cold or impersonal; it was human-centered and results-oriented. As he put it in the Preface to Dynamic Sociology, "The real object of science is to benefit man. A science which fails to do this, however agreeable its study, is lifeless. Sociology, which of all sciences should benefit man most, is in danger of falling into the class of polite amusements, or dead sciences. It is the object of this work to point out a method by which the breath of life may be breathed into its nostrils."

Ward theorized that poverty could be minimized or eliminated by the systematic intervention of society. Mankind wasn't helpless before the impersonal force of nature and evolution. Through the power of Mind, man could take control of his situation and direct the evolution of human society. This theory is known as telesis. (Also see: meliorism, sociocracy and public sociology). A sociology which intelligently and scientifically directed the social and economic development of society should institute a universal and comprehensive system of education, regulate competition, connect the people on the basis of equal opportunities and cooperation, and promote the happiness and the freedom of everyone.

Ward is most often remembered for his relentless attack on Herbert Spencer and his theories of laissez-faire and survival of the fittest that totally dominated socio/economic thought in the United States after the American Civil War. While Marx and communism/socialism never caught on in the United States, Spencer became famous and was the leading light for conservatives. Ward placed himself in direct opposition to Spencer and Spencer's American disciple William Graham Sumner, who had become the most well known and widely read American sociologist by single-mindedly promoting the principles of laissez-faire. To quote the historian Henry Steele Commager: "Ward was the first major scholar to attack this whole system of negativist and absolutist sociology and he remains the ablest.... Before Ward could begin to formulate that science of society which he hoped would inaugurate an era of such progress as the world had not yet seen, he had to destroy the superstitions that still held domain over the mind of his generation. Of these, laissez-faire was the most stupefying, and it was on the doctrine of laissez-faire that he trained his heaviest guns. The work of demolition performed in Dynamic Sociology, Psychic Factors and Applied Sociology was thorough."

Ward was a strong supporter of the concept of the welfare state, or state aid for those in need of it. He fiercely criticized those who criticized such policies as paternalistic, writing that the primary critics of state aid for the indigent were the wealthy classes who themselves lobbied for government assistance for their failing enterprises:

The charge of paternalism is chiefly made by the class that enjoys the largest share of government protection. Those who denounce it are those who most frequently and successfully invoke it. Nothing is more obvious today than the signal inability of capital and private enterprise to take care of themselves unaided by the state; and while they are incessantly denouncing "paternalism," by which they mean the claim of the defenseless laborer and artisan to a share in this lavish state protection, they are all the while besieging legislatures for relief from their own incompetency, and "pleading the baby act" through a trained body of lawyers and lobbyists. The dispensing of national pap to this class should rather be called "maternalism," to which a square, open, and dignified paternalism would be infinitely preferable.[6]

Ward was a strong advocate for equal rights for women and even theorized that women were naturally superior to men, much to the scorn of mainstream sociologists. In this regard, Ward presaged the rise of feminism, and especially the difference feminism of writers such as Harvard's Carol Gilligan, who have developed the claims of female superiority. Ward is now considered a feminist writer by historians such as Ann Taylor Allen. However, Clifford H. Scott claims that some suffragists ignored him.[7] Ward's persuasion on the question of female intelligence as described by himself: "And now from the point of view of intellectual development itself we find her side by side, and shoulder to shoulder with him furnishing, from the very outset, far back in prehistoric, presocial, and even prehuman times, the necessary complement to his otherwise one-sided, headlong, and wayward career, without which he would soon have warped and distorted the race and rendered it incapable of the very progress which he claims exclusively to inspire. And herefore again, even in the realm of intellect, where he would fain reign supreme, she has proved herself fully his equal and is entitled to her share of whatever credit attaches to human progress hereby achieved." Clifford H. Scott argues that practically all the suffragists ignored him.[7]

Ward had a considerable influence on the United States' environmental policy in the late 19th and early 20th century. Ross listed Ward among the four "philosopher/scientists" that shaped American early environmental policies. (see: Ross, John R.; Man over Nature)

Ward was a Republican Whig and supported the abolition of the American system of slavery. He enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War and was wounded three times. However, a close reading of his Dynamic Sociology will uncover several statements that would be considered somewhat racist and ethnocentric by today's standards. There are references to the superiority of Western culture and the savagery of the American Indian and black races, made all the more jarring by the modern feel of much of the rest of the book.

However, Ward lived in Washington D.C., then the center of anthropological research in the US; he was always up-to-date on the latest findings of science and in tune with the developing Zeitgeist, and by the early twentieth century, perhaps influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois and German-born Franz Boas, he began to focus more on the question of race.

During this period his views on race were arguably more progressive and in tune with modern standards than any other white academic of the time. In the 1870s, as editor of the Iconoclast, he published articles by Frederick Douglas and he was involved in the founding of Howard University. Later, while Charlotte Perkins Gilman and many sociologists supported the eugenics movement, he vigorously opposed it. Later Franz Boaz perhaps even more strongly combated the theory of white supremacy.

Ward is often categorized as being a follower of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Ward's article "Neo-Darwinism and Neo-Lamarckism" shows Ward had a sophisticated understanding of this subject. While he clearly described himself as being a Neo-Lamarckian, he completely and enthusiastically accepted Darwin's findings and theories. On the other hand, he believed that, logically, there had to be a mechanism that would allow environmental factors to influence evolution faster than Darwin's rather slow evolutionary process. The modern theory of epigenetics suggests that Ward was correct on this issue, although old-school Darwinians continue to ridicule Larmarkianism.[8]

While Durkheim is usually credited for updating Comte's positivism to modern scientific and sociological standards, Ward accomplished much the same thing 10 years earlier in the United States. However, Ward would be the last person to claim that his contributions were somehow unique or original to him. As Gillis J. Harp points out in The Positivist Republic, Comte's positivism found a fertile ground in the democratic republic of the United States, and there soon developed among the pragmatic intellectual community in New York City, which featured such thinkers as William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, as well as among federal government scientists like Ward in Washington, D.C., a consensus regarding positivism.

In Pure Sociology: A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society (1903) Ward theorizes that throughout human history conflict and war have been the forces that are most responsible for human progress. It was through conflict that hominids gained dominance over animals. It was through conflict and war that Homo Sapiens wiped out the less advanced hominid species, and it was through war that the more technologically advanced races and nations expanded their territory and spread civilization. Ward sees war as a natural evolutionary process and like all natural evolutionary processes war is capricious, slow, often ineffective and shows no regard for the pain inflicted on living creatures. One of the central tenets of Ward's world view is that the artificial is superior to the natural and thus one of the central goals of Applied Sociology is to replace war with a system that retains the progressive elements that war has provided but without the many miseries it inflicts.[9]

Ward influenced a rising generation of progressive political leaders, such as Herbert Croly. In the book Lester Ward and the Welfare State, Commager details Ward's influence and refers to him as the "father of the modern welfare state".

As a political approach, Ward's system became known as social liberalism, as distinguished from the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries associated with such thinkers as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. While classical liberalism had sought prosperity and progress through laissez-faire, Ward's "American social liberalism" sought to enhance social progress through direct government intervention. Ward believed that in large, complex and rapidly growing societies human freedom could only be achieved with the assistance of a strong democratic government acting in the interest of the individual. The characteristic element of Ward's thinking was his faith that government, acting on the empirical and scientifically based findings of the science of sociology, could be harnessed to create a near Utopian social order.

Progressive thinking had a profound impact on the administrations of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson and on the liberal wing of the modern Democratic Party. Ward's ideas were in the air but there are few direct links between his writings and the actual programs of the founders of the welfare state and the New Deal.[10]

All but the first of his voluminous diaries were reportedly destroyed by his wife after his death. Ward's first journal, Young Ward's Diary: A Human and Eager Record of the Years Between 1860 and 1870..., remains under copyright.

Ward died in Washington, D.C.. He is buried in Watertown, New York.

• Becker, Ernest. Escape From Evil. Free Press, reissue edition. 1985.
• John Chynoweth Burnham (1956). Lester Frank Ward in American thought. Annals of American sociology. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press. ISBN 9780742522176.
• Samuel Chugerman (1939). Lester F. Ward, the American Aristotle: A Summary and Interpretation of His Sociology. Literary Licensing, LLC. ISBN 978-1-258-10598-3.
• Chriss, James J. (2006). "The Place of Lester Ward among the Sociological Classics". Journal of Classical Sociology. 6 (1): 5–21. doi:10.1177/1468795X06061282. S2CID 145704932.
• Commager, Henry Steele (1950). "Lester Ward and the Science of Society". The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-00046-7.
• Commager, Henry Steele, ed. Lester Ward and the Welfare State. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967.
• Coser, Lewis. A History of Sociological Analysis, Basic Books, New York http://www.sociology.ccsu.edu/adair/american_trends_by_lewis_coser.htm
• Dahms, Harry F. Lester F. Ward http://web.utk.edu/~hdahms/Ward.pdf
• Finlay, Barbara. "Lester Frank Ward as a Sociologist Of Gender: A New Look at His Sociological Work." Gender & Society, Vol. 13, No. 2, 251–265 (1999) http://gas.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/2/251
• Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America, pg. 160 https://books.google.com/books?id=WUucYTW6ug0C&pg=PP1&dq=Race:+the+history+of+an+idea+in+America&client=opera#v=onepage&q=&f=false
• Harp, Gillis J. Positivist Republic, Ch. 5 "Lester F. Ward: Positivist Whig" https://books.google.com/books?id=8M_6u9DO7PwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0
• Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought, Chapter 4, (original 1944, 1955. reprint Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). https://books.google.com/books?id=Ty8aEmWc_ekC&dq=Social+Darwinism+in+American+Thought&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=ahuvSd3ENJ6DtwfatZn-BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result
• Largey, Gale. Lester Ward: A Global Sociologist http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/3/7/7/0/pages237708/p237708-1.php
• Mers, Adelheid. Fusion http://adelheidmers.org/aweb/fusion.pdf
• Perlstadt, Harry. Applied Sociology as Translational Research: A One Hundred Fifty Year Voyage http://www.msu.edu/~perlstad/History_Applied_Sociology_H_Perlstadt_Jun_05.pdf
• Rafferty, Edward C. 'Apostle of Human Progress. Lester Frank Ward and American Political Thought, 1841/1913. https://books.google.com/books?id=4Q_5F1gu-mMC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
• Ravitch, Diane. Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. Simon & Schuster. "Chapter one: The Educational Ladder" https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/ravitch-back.html
• Ross, John R. Man over Nature: the origins of the conservation movement https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/view/2348/2307
• Ross, Dorthy. The Origins of American Social Science. Cambridge University Press https://books.google.com/books?id=rg4blh6xmhIC&pg=PA85
• Seidelman, Raymond and Harpham, Edward J. Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884–1984. pg. 26 https://books.google.com/books?id=09-ZDrzUz-gC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0
• Wood, Clement. The Sociology Of Lester F Ward https://archive.org/details/sociologyofleste033176mbp

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• History of feminism