Thirty-one years after graduating from Harvard College, Patrick Schmidt found the four-page, single-spaced letter from eminent sociologist David Riesman encouraging him to publish his senior honors thesis on Harvard’s Department of Social Relations.
"You have done an extraordinary piece of work, and I think it should be published. . . You have worked with scrupulousness and care, and have produced a document of lasting value. . . If you do have a chance, as I very much hope, to do further work on it, I would have a number of comments and suggestions to offer. Let me just say a few things in the meantime."
His mother had saved the letter, along with other mementos of his youth, and when she died, it made its way to him. Thus reminded of the kindness and generosity of the celebrated author of The Lonely Crowd, he immediately decided to publish the story of how four Harvard professors, supported by a bold dean, sought to create not merely a new department, but a new science. It is a unique chronicle supported by Schmidt’s undergraduate interviews with key players in, and observers of, the department’s trajectory, such as Talcott Parsons, Henry Murray, George Homans, David McClelland, and B.F. Skinner.
Harvard established the Department of Social Relations in 1946, when the foreign policy intelligentsia of the new American empire believed they could reshape the world. Psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists were dreaming big dreams at Harvard of how they, too, could play a role and contribute to human progress. Emboldened by their successful contributions to the government’s wartime research on a wide range of issues, they felt there was no limit to what the behavioral sciences – and especially their new interdisciplinary approach – could achieve. The department was at the epicenter of the exaggerated expectations for social science in postwar America. Social Relations attracted luminaries to its faculty, but failed to create a new science, thus serving as a cautionary tale even today for universities that would succumb to the siren call of interdisciplinarity and promote such ventures without a solid theoretical foundation.
Beyond the intellectual ferment over what the department and its constituent disciplines should encompass, the storied faculty of Social Relations had fascinating connections with societal, political, and cultural events of the twentieth century. Its sociologists spawned modernization theory, seeking to make the newly liberated colonial world “modern” and thus, inevitably, it was thought, democratic, peaceful, and, well, like America. The Soviet Union was the real focus of cold war scholarship, however, and Social Relations faculty, led by anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, established the Russian Research Center with funding from the CIA, serving, sometimes secretly, as the government’s research arm and answering such questions as what the Russian people would do if the United States invaded.
Scandals divided the faculty and cast the department in an unfavorable light nationally and internationally. Social Relations is notorious for faculty such as Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (reborn as Ram Dass), who researched the effects of the psychedelic drug psilocybin on students, and Henry Murray, who traumatized undergraduate Theodore Kaczynski in a three-year-long abusive psychological experiment. The radical Students for a Democratic Society infiltrated the teaching staff of the department’s largest course in 1968-1969, promoting a political agenda with farcical academic standards and igniting a bitter controversy in Social Relations and throughout the Harvard community.
