ABSTRACT
I thought it might be appropriate to say something about how our fi eld has developed and changed in the 60-or-so years that I have been involved in it. To make these years more tangible, let me say that research for my Master’s Thesis at Columbia University was completed in 1951 under the direction of Professor Leo Lowenthal. Lowenthal’s presence in New York at that time reminds us that this was only a few years after World War II when he and other members of the famous Frankfurt School of Social Research found refuge in the United States, with the help of Professors Robert Lynd and Paul Lazarsfeld. Lazarsfeld himself had arrived in New York a decade or so earlier to establish an empirically minded center for social research-expanding on the one he had founded in Vienna. Thus, Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research in the 40s and 50s saw the convergence of Lazarsfeld’s Viennese associates-among them Herta Herzog, Hans Zeisel, Marie Jahoda, and others; the Frankfurt group-Lowenthal, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and others (Wheatland, 2009); and a group of young American sociologists, some of them the children of European immigrants, such as Herbert Hyman and Robert Merton. Contributions to the American War effort had enhanced the reputation of applied social science, and, as a result, a soon-to-be-famous cohort of graduate students, subsidized by the so-called G.I. Bill for veterans of the war, enrolled at Columbia (and other major American Universities) including Peter Blau, James Coleman, Joseph Klapper, Martin Lipset, and
many others. Inspired, a least in part, by Lazarsfeld’s Bureau, similar centers of empirical social science were established at Chicago, at Michigan, in Norway, in Israel, in Poland, and elsewhere.
