The Victory Lab (4 page)

O
n February 27, 1919, a radio and buzzer operator at Camp Hancock near Augusta, Georgia, took to a typewriter and composed a message to his superiors requesting a discharge. Sergeant First Class Harold Foote Gosnell was just six months into his military service. He had entered the army the previous fall, answering a draft notice just days after earning his bachelor’s degree from his hometown campus, the University of Rochester. As soon as he earned a license as a radio operator, commercial second grade, which required him to type twenty words a minute, he wrote military officials with the news. Eager to be shipped out, he bragged that he had also mastered the flag-signaling languages known as wigwag and semaphore. But by the time Gosnell was called to report for duty with the 47th Service Company at Hancock in mid-September, there wasn’t much war left on the calendar for him. Six months later, as the duties for a signal officer were receding, the obligations of a widow’s son came to the fore. In February, Gosnell’s mother
wrote him from upstate New York to report that she had been sent to the Clifton Springs Sanitarium on account of her heart trouble. “Doctor says it’s valvular and muscular. Sometimes I can hardly get my breath and sometimes my heart pains me,” she wrote. “So that I think you ought to come home as soon as possible if you want to see me.”

Gosnell, twenty-two, was granted an honorable discharge, and left for his mother’s bedside. He had never planned on staying long in the military, anyway. From Hancock he had applied to graduate schools to study the new field of political science, but knew he couldn’t afford to attend any of them unless he received some financial support. Gosnell came from a working-class family and inherited its puritan temperament. One grandfather had been a Civil War veteran, and Harold’s father (who died when he was four) a vehement prohibitionist who joined the Republicans because they were “the party of the drys” and railed against the Rochester Chamber of Commerce dinner as “an annual drunk.”

Eight-year-old Harold had been captivated by the 1904 presidential election, which pitted two New Yorkers against one another. Gosnell was drawn to the swashbuckling profile of the Republican incumbent, Theodore Roosevelt, over Democrat Alton Parker, chief judge of the state’s appeals court, and learned to hum the party’s campaign ditty:
Farewell, Judge Parker/Farewell to you/Teddy’s in the White House/And he’ll stay there too
. In high school, he was a serious student and prolific artist, contributing hand-drawn covers with images of columns and coliseums for his high school’s Latin-language magazine,
Vox Populi
. When it became time to focus his attention, Gosnell knew he wanted to study how votes were won, and few places were as ripe for examination as Chicago.

In 1919, Chicago was already the country’s second-largest municipality—a lakefront skyline casting an ever-expanding shadow over a farrago of stockyards, bungalows, and rail lines unspooling across the Midwest—and had the lively political scene that a capital of monopolists and mobsters would deserve. “In spite of the city’s bad reputation for graft, bootlegging, gangster killings, election frauds, racketeering, and street violence,” Gosnell
would later write, “buildings went up, superhighways were built, and the functions of an urban metropolis somehow were performed.”

That fall, Gosnell arrived in Hyde Park, where stone quadrangles had been planted to give the University of Chicago the dignified air of England’s legacy institutions.
The university had opened its doors in 1892, one the first schools to do so with the declared goal of welcoming graduate students in search of Ph.D.s,
still new to American academia and a matter of scant emphasis at prestigious old colleges like Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. Chicago had the architecture of an old place, which made the young school feel as far from the bustle of the Loop as Oxford did from London. Along the Midway, where the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 had unveiled Chicago as the model modern city, the school’s Harper Memorial Library had recently been erected as a medieval castle. Its crown studded with crenellated turrets, the building seemed to reflect a time-honored model of academic research. Those who studied society had typically done so from the comfort of a carrel, relying on historical documents to bolster their theories of how people live.

But at Chicago, tradition stopped at aesthetics. Through their work, young social scientists were constantly scheming to pull the university deeper into the scrum of the industrial metropolis just a cable-car ride away. “You have been told to choose problems wherever you can find musty stacks of routine records based on trivial schedules prepared by tired bureaucrats and filled out by reluctant applicants for aid or fussy do-gooders or indifferent clerks,” sociologist Robert E. Park warned his graduate students. Instead, he said, they should “sit in the lounges of the luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses,” to observe their subjects in real time. “Gentlemen, go get the seat of your pants dirty in real research.” A shelf of the books produced by Park’s protégés throughout the 1920s and 1930s gave shape to the idea of a “Chicago school” of scholarship, but they could be mistaken, at quick glance, for a rack of dime-store novels:
The Gang, The Hobo, The Gold Coast and the Slum, The Taxi-Dance Hall, Hotel Life, Vice in Chicago
.

Gosnell, a small man who preferred his glasses round and his hair in a slick, parted wad, was dispirited to find little such adventurism in his department. Political science had few graduate students, and Gosnell had trouble finding friends among his peers. He had little affection for the department’s chair, Harry Pratt Judson, who also happened to be the university’s president and governed his department by
terse memos on presidential stationery. With a background in constitutional law and diplomatic history, Judson had helped to establish one of the country’s first departments devoted to “political science,” an assertively modern name designed to set the new study of statecraft apart from the historically minded discipline once known as political economy.

But Gosnell felt his department was atrophying under Judson’s leadership. Like many of the early tribunes of the new discipline, Judson had little interest in actually bringing scientistic authority to bear on politics. “I do not like the term political science,” outgoing Princeton president and New Jersey governor-elect Woodrow Wilson had said at the 1910 conference of the recently established American Political Science Association. Human relationships, Wilson told the gathering at a St. Louis hotel, “are not in any proper sense the subject matter of science. They are the stuff of insight and sympathy and spiritual comprehension.” The previous year, Wilson’s predecessor as the association’s president had drawn a related, if less mystical, distinction. “We are limited by the impossibility of experiment,” said Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell. “Politics is an observational, not an experimental science.”

In 1923, Judson finally relinquished his chairmanship, fanning Gosnell’s hopes that his department could at last modernize. The selection of Judson’s replacement may have looked like a default choice: Charles E. Merriam was the department’s only full-time professor. But he was also a giant in Chicago life. A native Iowan, Merriam had studied at Columbia, whose president Seth Low had stepped down from his office after winning the 1901 election to be the second mayor of the newly consolidated New York City. Merriam watched Low’s campaign closely and saw him
as a model for the engaged public intellectual. Upon arriving in Chicago, Merriam quickly began lending his expertise to policymakers, blessing the initiatives of the modernizing metropolis with a scholar’s kiss. In 1905, he was asked by the City Club of Chicago to research municipal revenues. Three years later, after business leaders recruited architect Daniel Burnham to draw up a city plan, the mayor appointed Merriam to the Chicago Harbor Commission with a charge to implement a new waterfront agenda.

The idea that academic experts could tutor politicians reflected a popular Progressive era attitude, and Merriam became something of a utility man to reformers intent on fixing the broken city. He was elected to the city council in 1909 as a Republican and immediately agitated for the creation of a Commission to Investigate City Expenditures. The Merriam Commission uncovered graft and corruption involving party machines, winning its namesake few friends among his council colleagues but encouraging business leaders to view him as the kind of man they would like to see in charge. In 1911, Merriam ran for mayor, proudly publishing the names of his campaign contributors even though no law required him to. He won the Republican primary by antagonizing party bosses who never warmed to their nominee, but he narrowly lost the general election.

Still, the professor-turned-politician found himself energized by this new world. For Merriam, city government was also something of a refuge from academic politics, with slightly grander stakes. In 1919, he again sought the mayoralty, challenging William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, a charmingly corrupt incumbent able to easily dismiss Merriam in the Republican primary. He returned to the university embittered by his decade at city hall, caught between two party machines and what he saw as the institutionalized perfidy of both, raising questions and fixing resentments that would inspire Merriam’s research agenda for the rest of his life.

To the extent that scholars believed they could explain why elections turned out the way they did, it was because they thought they understood how parties worked. Those who studied politics tended to study institutions, such as courts and legislatures, and the institutions of campaigns
were political parties. Parties were an unmistakably important force in nineteenth-century politics, which Merriam knew intimately: by
keeping the Union intact, the Republican Party had earned his father’s undying fealty, which he passed down to his son. During the 1896 election,
Charles and his brother teased their father for being so reliant on Republican Party doctrine that they joked he had to go to the train depot in their small Iowa town and wait for the newspapers to arrive before he could be sure of what he believed. When Charles got to Chicago, he saw that in big cities, parties—with their clearly delineated hierarchies of county chairmen and precinct officers interlocked with neighborhood ethnic communities—were not merely organizations that told voters what to think but also delivery devices for the patronage spoils that won their loyalty.

But thanks in part to the efforts of reformers like Merriam, parties were weakening their hold on the political process. In 1907,
Oregon became the first state to have its senators directly elected by citizens, instead of by state legislatures that often just rubber-stamped the picks of party bosses. In 1908, Chicago implemented primary elections for city offices, replacing party nominating conventions. Merriam was quick to realize that these primaries heralded an important shift in the culture of politics, as voters could no longer rely on party leaders to pick their standard-bearers. As a reformer, Merriam was encouraged by this, and as an academic he thought the shift of power to the citizenry made elections ripe for serious study. He
sent a questionnaire to the burgeoning band of political scientists nationwide to get their opinions on what the actual effects of this more democratic system would be. “Does the direct primary bring out a larger vote than the convention system?” was one of Merriam’s nine queries.

The political scientists had little insight to offer Merriam. Because they had been so intent on unlocking the dynamics of institutions, they had largely ignored voters themselves. There was no governing theory of where people got their information and how they processed it, or the relative role that parties, issues, and candidate profiles played in their minds as they weighed their choices before election day. In fact, political science
could do little to explain why people voted at all when the law did not require it. But to a first-year graduate student drawn to the rough-and-tumble of urban politics, nothing impressed like a professor looking for answers to these questions, and demonstrating equal fluency in scholarly footnotes and ward-by-ward returns. “Naturally, I took every course that Merriam had to offer,” Harold Gosnell later wrote.

The same forces that had foiled Merriam’s political ambitions were the ones that most fascinated Gosnell. He wrote his thesis on Thomas Platt, the New York senator whose machinations during sessions known as “Platt’s Sunday School Class” at the Fifth Avenue Hotel made him for a generation the dominant force in the state’s Republican politics. Gosnell said his goal was to mine “the social background, the personal qualities, and the technique of a typical state political boss.” That meant looking past the dynamics of institutions and into the motives of the individuals who drove them, and it meant reaching into psychology for tools foreign to political science. “What was there, first in Platt’s personality, in his general behavior, that led men to think that he could ‘do things’?” Gosnell wrote. The University of Chicago Press was interested in publishing
Boss Platt and His New York Machine
but unwilling to finance it, so Gosnell arranged a discount rate through his nephew’s brother’s publishing firm and paid to have it printed himself.

Gosnell received his Ph.D. in 1922, and Merriam approached him shortly after to offer a post as an instructor. Merriam was already deep into his efforts to rebuild the department from its decay under Judson; he had made clear he would not run again for political office and now
hoped to use the university as his sole perch for improving local politics and government. He established a Social Science Research Council, with the goal of producing scholarship across disciplines—economics and sociology, in addition to political science—that would finally conjoin the university’s work with the life of the city. “I accepted the offer with alacrity,” Gosnell later recalled.

Gosnell affectionately called Merriam “the Chief” and the two men shared an intimate love of urban politics, but a methodological gap was
opening up between them. Gosnell had taken graduate courses in statistics and mathematics and was eager to apply numbers to the political questions that interested him. “While Charles E. Merriam gave lip service to quantitative, psychological, and empirical research he was essentially a philosopher dealing with ideas and an activist dealing with programs,” Gosnell wrote. “While he liked to see others strive to be scientific, he personally was a philosopher high in the clouds spinning out ideas, not bothered by the mundane search for facts.”