[In the following excerpt from an article originally published in 1962, Morton and Lucia White describe Park's sociological vision of the city.]

Park's career is the story of a sociologist who first saw society at close range as a newspaperman, then developed broad philosophical and sociological interests, and finally became an influential teacher of sociology at the University of Chicago. He traced his interest in sociology to his reading of Goethe's Faust, especially to Faust's fatigue with books and his desire to see the world. Starting his world-seeing as a reporter in Minneapolis, Park later moved on to New York, "the mecca of every ambitious newspaperman"; but like Dreiser he too became disenchanted with that city because, as Park put it, the newspaperman of those days usually lasted only about eight years and then was considered obsolete. During his newspaper work, Park came to realize that "a reporter with the facts was a more effective reformer than an editorial writer thundering from the pulpit." Without abandoning his passion for concrete information, he developed an interest in the philosophy of the newspaper that sent him back to the University of Michigan, where he met John Dewey. He also had a crucial encounter with a certain Franklin Ford, who had reported Wall Street, who had become interested in the function of the press and who had influenced Dewey's thinking too. After graduating from the University of Michigan, Park entered Harvard where, he says, he "studied philosophy because [he] hoped to gain insight into the nature and function of the kind of knowledge we call news. Besides, [he] wanted to gain a fundamental point of view from which [he] could describe the behavior of society under the influence of news in the precise and universal language of science."

Like Jane Addams and John Dewey, Park had come under the spell of William James. While Park was at Harvard, he had heard James deliver his famous talk "On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings," in which James decried the blindness we are all afflicted with when it comes to understanding the feelings of people different from ourselves. James urged his audience not to regard as meaningless forms of existence other than their own and to tolerate, to respect, and to indulge those who harmlessly pursue their own ways, however unintelligible these might be. In a thrust at absolutism, James issued a command of toleration: "Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands." This was the kind of advice that could inspire both social workers and sociologists in the city. "Even prisons and sickrooms have their special revelations," said James. "It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field." James' essay, Park recalled, had a steadily increasing significance for his own thinking. "The 'blindness' of which James spoke," as Park saw it, "is the blindness each of us is likely to have for the meaning of other people's lives." Park came to think that "what sociologists most need to know is what goes on behind the faces of men, what it is that makes life for each of us either dull or thrilling. For 'if you lose the joy you lose all.' But the thing that gives zest to life or makes life dull is, however, as James says, 'a personal secret' which has, in every single case, to be discovered. Otherwise we do not know the world in which we actually live."

After his work at Harvard, Park went abroad to Germany. While in Berlin he studied with Georg Simmel, whose view of the city as a state of mind rather than as merely a physical environment, profoundly affected Park's own conception of city life. Looking back on this period when his interest in sociology crystallized, Park wrote that he first thought of the sociologist as "a super-reporter" of the "Big News," of long-term trends, of what actually is going on rather than what seems to be going on. James had stimulated him to find out what went on behind the faces of individual men, while Simmel had encouraged him to study what the German sociologist called "mental life" of the city as a whole. While Park acknowledged that Americans at that time were mainly indebted to novelists for their more intimate awareness of modern life, he wanted to go beyond what might be found in their writings with the help of objective, scientific techniques.

Like Jane Addams, Park threw in his lot with Chicago in the early twentieth century, and remained for much of his life interested in its ebullient growth and kaleidoscopic transformations. He concentrated his attention on it and based his generalizations on it during the first three decades of this century, when it was growing at the rate of half a million new inhabitants every decade. He had spent his early years in a small town, but like so many of his generation, he was personally attracted to the city as a social milieu where—as he put it—"everyone is more or less on his own." In more theoretical terms he explained the attraction of the metropolis for masses of people as partly due to the fact that there they found, more than in a small community, the moral climate to stimulate their innate qualities and bring them to full expression. The big city uniquely rewarded eccentricity, according to Park: even the criminal, the defective, and the genius found more opportunities to develop their dispositions in a great city than in a small town. Among other enticements of the city, as compared with small town and country, Park noted the heightened element of chance; and he speculated further that the lure of great cities arises perhaps from stimulation which directly affects the reflexes, "like the attraction of the flame for the moth, as a sort of 'tropism.'"

Park's use of the figure of the moth drawn into the flame is one indication of his view of the city as both attractive and destructive. He observed that the city was full of what he termed plenty of "human junk," who "have fallen out of line in the march of industrial progress." He admitted that the vast, nondescript, deteriorated areas which had become the American city slums were not places of "unity and charm," but the slums seemed to Park unusually interesting because they were in social transition.

For Park, the city is not simply a legal entity, it is, in his much-used phrase, primarily a state of mind. It is not merely a collection of people, of social conveniences, or of administrative arrangements. It is "a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is a product of nature and particularly of human nature." As a human ecologist, he viewed the unplanned concentration of a large population in a small locality as comparable to the natural formation of plant and animal colonies. However, in cities, Park observed, a collection of people is further organized by human "tools" like communication, transportation, political institutions, and economic devices such as factories. Tools, people and place are all woven into one "psycho-physical mechanism." A human society is distinguished from a physical collection of individuals by communication resulting in corporate action, action directed toward a common end which, Park and his collaborator Burgess held, "is perhaps all that can be legitimately included in the conception of 'organic' as applied to society."

Like Dewey and Jane Addams, Park thought that society exists only in and through communication, and he linked this theoretical conclusion with his own personal interest in the newspaper. The newspaper, Park held, was the great medium of communication within the city. He looked upon the newspaper as an organ for mobilizing public opinion in the city, taking the place of the village gossip, the town-meeting orator, and the local preacher. And because he believed that the newspaper played such a key role in the city, Park thought that the distribution of newspaper circulation might be used as a measure of metropolitan influence. Park and his associate, Charles Newcomb, pointed out that "communication is fundamental to the existence of every form and type of society, and one form of communication, namely the newspaper, has been found to circulate over the natural areas within which society is organized. Thus it may not seem unreasonable that the newspaper should be used as an index in outlining a number of metropolitan regions of the United States." Park thought of a region as a social unit to the extent to which its inhabitants read one group of newspapers.

On the assumption that cities can cohere only so long as their residents communicate with each other, Park tried to discover various social processes in Chicago which encouraged or discouraged human understanding and communication. And his general conclusion was that understanding and communication are more fragmentary in the city than in the town and the village. Though some developments in Chicago around the turn of the century, particularly the cohesion of isolated ethnic groups and the formation of neighborhood associations in the slums, protected people from social dislocation in the new environment and preserved mutual understanding, the more powerful process of division of labor ultimately substituted organization based on occupation and vocational interests for one based on family ties, culture, caste, and status. The result was the gradual dissolution of "the moral order" resting on the latter kind of connection. According to Park, "a very large part of the population of great cities, including those who make their homes in tenements and apartment houses, live much as people do in some great hotel, meeting, but not knowing, one another. The effect of this is to substitute fortuitous and casual relationship for the more intimate and permanent association of the smaller community." Park used the circulation of newspapers as a measure of metropolitan spread, but he agreed with Walter Lippmann that the newspaper was not an altogether effective device for mobilizing public opinion. Dewey also came to this conclusion.… and this was partly responsible for Dewey's conviction that the so-called face-to-face group would have to be restored and revitalized if democracy was to remain workable in the industrial age.

The industrial age, on Park's view, is characterized not only by social mobility but also by increased physical mobility brought about by various types of mechanized transportation, as Howells had also observed. In a famous essay on the city which he first published in 1916, Park argued, as Dewey would later, that "it is probably the breaking down of local attachments and the weakening of the restraints and inhibitions of the primary group, under the influence of the urban environment, which are largely responsible for the increase of vice and crime in great cities." And by the primary group he meant what Charles Horton Cooley meant by it—a group in which "face-to-face association and cooperation" predominated. Park reiterated in his essay, "Community Organization and Juvenile Delinquency," that division of labor, social mobility, and the multiplication of the means of transportation and communication had undermined the influence of older forms of social control like the family, the neighborhood, and the local community. "It is probably," he warned, "that the most deadly and the most demoralizing single instrumentality of present-day civilization is the automobile … The connection of the automobile with vice is notorious." The newspaper and the movies, he added, were not as deadly but almost as demoralizing. The urban home, Park lamented, had become little more than a sleeping-place, a dormitory, under conditions of modern life. In his essay, "Community Organization and the Romantic Temper," he argued that twentieth-century leisure had created a restless search for excitement in the city, a "romantic impulse … to escape the dull routine of life at home and in the local community." Park went on: "This romantic quest which finds its most outrageous expression in the dance halls and the jazz parlors is characteristic of almost every other expression of modern life. Political revolution and social reform are themselves often merely expressions of this … We are seeking to escape from a dull world instead of turning back upon it to transform it." By contrast, Park thought, recent immigrants, who maintained their simple village habits in religious and mutual aid organizations, had been best able to withstand the shock of the new environment. And he revealed the extent to which he was impressed by pre-industrial society when he reflected that, "in some sense these communities in which our immigrants live their smaller lives may be regarded as models for our own. We are seeking to do, through the medium of our local community organizations, such things as will get action and interest for the little world of the locality. We are encouraging a new parochialism, seeking to initiate a movement that will run counter to the current romanticism with its eye always on the horizon, one which will recognize limits and work within them. Our problem is to encourage men to seek God in their own villages and to see the social problem in their own neighborhood."

There was no implication here that the modern city should be destroyed or abandoned. But throughout Park's writing there are suggestions of disappointment over the fact that a return to the rural past was impossible. Although he spoke favorably of the city as an expression of man's effort to remake the natural environmental after his own desires, he remarked that "if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live." No brief passage can do better than the following to summarize his view that the reform of the city should be seriously influenced by a model of the pre-industrial past: "The social problem is fundamentally a city problem. It is the problem of achieving in the freedom of the city a social order and a social control equivalent to that which grew up naturally in the family, the clan, and the tribe." Although it has been rightly said that "Park's choice lay with the city" because in it "every man is on his own," it is worth quoting a passage in which Park made that observation about the city in order to see how qualified his admiration was for being on one's own: "The peasant who comes to the city to work and live is, to be sure, emancipated from the control of ancestral custom, but at the same time, he is no longer backed by the collective wisdom of the peasant community. He is on his own. The case of the peasant is typical. Every one is more or less on his own in a city. The consequence is that man, translated to the city, has become a problem to himself and to society in a way and to an extent that he never was before." And in 1931, Park observed that "everything in our modern world, under the pressure of changing conditions, has begun to crumble. This is even true, as one gathers from Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, of the western world's conviction of its own superiority; the one indomitable idea on which its faith in its future is finally based, has also begun to crack."

One might say in this connection that Park accepted this city-made problem as a challenge, and that he regarded the city as an arena of struggle in which he wished to live and study for just this reason. But acknowledging this should not obscure two things of great importance in understanding Park's place in the development of American thought on the city: that he was not a city-booster, and that he looked back from the metropolis to the days of the family, the tribe and the clan with some sense of nostalgia. He did not admire without qualification the anonymity and impersonality of the city as Dreiser did at times—certainly he did not romanticize the life of the Bohemian. And, when he summed up the contributions of cities to civilization, he said explicitly that they had made no contribution to morals as we ordinarily understand that term. "Quite the contrary. Cities have been proverbially and very properly described as 'wicked.'" And this remark was not ironical or jocose in intention. When Park came to list the contributions of the city, he did so in a matter-of-fact manner. Cities had been melting-pots; they had brought together people of different classes; they had broken what Bagehot called the "cake of custom"; they had diffused inventions by providing market-places; they were the homes of rationality and science.

Although Park challenged the Emersonian view of the city as a mere artifact, he occasionally lapsed into romantic language about the city's defects. In such a milieu, he thought, the detached, anonymous individual was often deprived of natural outlets for expression of interest and energy. Instead the city dweller built up a "world of means" between impulse and distant future ends and values; and he concentrated on such conventional signs as fashion, front, and manners to establish his status. Moreover, as the isolated individual shifted his attachments from primary to secondary contacts, from more continuous association with kin and neighbors to discontinuous associations at distant jobs in the wider world of the city, social control had to be transformed from the mores to new legal instruments of discipline that Park describes as necessarily formal and for the most part crude and inefficient. Because of the loosening of social ties in the city, the standing of the individual and the family became uncertain and subject to abrupt changes upward or downward in the social scale. Not only was the individual detached in the urban world, but he lost what Veblen called his instinct for workmanship, as Jane Addams also observed, in monotonous employment in the modern, standardized, industrial system; and in other activities of his life, he ceased to be an actor and become a spectator instead. This whole sum of adaptations to urban life, in the view of Park, Simmel, and may other students of the city, but a premium on rationality and impersonality, for the individual was forced to develop an urbane, emotional reserve and use his intelligence more energetically under city conditions.

For Park, however, urbanity was not a virtue. It is developed in the urban world, and not in what he calls the "little worlds" of the family, the tribe, the local community. Since me latter encourage intimate relations and mutual responsiveness, they help nurture definite personalities rather than etiquette, urbanity, sophistication, and finish. "Urbanity is a charming quality, but it is not a virtue. We don't ever really get to know the urbane person, and hence never know when to trust him. It is more or less fundamental traits of personality which arise in the intimate group which enable us to act with definiteness and assurance toward others. Manners are of secondary importance."

In his disparagement of urban etiquette, sophistication, manners, and finish, Park agreed with Thorstein Veblen. Veblen held that conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption are the two main ways of achieving social reputation by way of displaying wealth, and went on to say that "the choice between them is a question of advertising expediency simply." So long as a community is small, one method is as good as the other. But in an urban community, where the individual is exposed to so many people who can only judge his eminence by the goods he displays, conspicuous consumption comes to be the typical mode of self-advertisement. Since, according to Veblen, the industrial system does not encourage more than mechanical neighborliness or mere physical proximity in the city, one's mechanical neighbors are not one's social neighbors, nor even one's acquaintances. In the city, social relations are primarily external. The individual is exposed mainly to the gaze of "transient observers" in churches, theatres, hotels, shops, and parks; and therefore "the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs may read."

Park's reflections are also related to those of Hegel and Marx. Though Park usually refrained from explicit moralizing about industrialized, booming Chicago, one cannot help noting that something like Hegel's and Marx's concept of alienation was a prominent theme in his descriptions of it, and that Park, along with several German theorists of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, believed that the life of pre-modern man was more spontaneous, autonomous, and secure than that of the city-dweller. Park looked about him in Chicago and saw that it was attractive and interesting, but that beneath its attractions it generated a maze of social problems as industrialization and mobility increased. His misgivings about the size and complexity of Chicago, as compared to the smaller, simpler community, were summed up by Park and Burgess as follows: "The very existence of a great city creates problems of health, of family life, and social control which did not exist when men lived in the open or in villages. Just as the human body generates the poisons that eventually destroy it, so the communal life, in the very process of growth and as a result of its efforts to meet the changes that its growth involves, creates diseases and vices which tend to destroy the community … Communities may and do grow old and die, but new communities profiting by the experience of their predecessors are enabled to create social organizations more adequate and better able to resist social diseases and corrupting vices. But in order to do this, succeeding communities have had to accumulate more experience, exercise more forethought, employ more special knowledge and a greater division of labor. In the meantime, life is becoming constantly more complex. In place of the simple spontaneous modes of behavior which enable the lower animals to live without education and without anxiety, men are compelled to supplement original nature with special training and with more and more elaborate machinery, until life, losing its spontaneity, seems in danger of losing all its joy." The pattern of social development on this view proceeded from poison to scientific antidote to joylessness.

Park and Burgess added no argument to show that urban life merely seemed to be in danger of losing all its joy. The implication was that the scientific techniques, which on Park's view were characteristic of the city, really did lead to the destruction of spontaneity and joy. And it must be remembered that Park believed, with his teacher William James, that if one loses the joy of life, one loses all. So the urban sociologist who studied the American city as few had studied it up to his time, continued the intellectual tradition of grave doubt about its future. He thought of the city as a part of nature, but he also thought that it would naturally become corrupt, mat the body politic, in the traditional anti-urban metaphor, would succumb to internally generated poisons which would destroy the joy of social existence. Park may have been excited by the city as a challenge to social scientists, as a laboratory for the study of social problems, but he had serious doubts about its moral qualities when he compared it to the pre-urban communities and modes of social organization that had preceded it in America and elsewhere. He may have been excited by the city because it provided him with problems in social science, just as Hawthorne found the decaying city stimulating when viewed as the subject matter of literature. But it is one thing to admire a state of affairs for its own attractive qualities, and another to admire it because its very corruptness challenges one's theoretical, practical, or artistic powers. The physician who works on cancer is challenged by that human scourge without being pleased by it. In the same way, the student of what Jefferson called the cancer on the body politic might be challenged by it without being pleased by it. One is tempted to say that Park's published statements on the city reveal more the admiration of the scientist investigating a fascinating phenomenon than the delight of a person who finds that phenomenon intrinsically pleasing.