A Life in the First Half-Century of Sociology:

The customary division of the history of American Sociology into the periods before and after 1945 is well grounded. In 1944, Charles Ellwood, one of the first Ph..D.s in sociology, and a former American Sociological Society President, published his bitter final message, his “Valedictory ” (1944) which testified both to the changes in the discipline and to his loss of hope for it. He died in 1946 at 73. At the same time, a new generation was taking over American sociology, and taking it over at both an unprecedently young age and in what turned out to be almost unprecedented conditions of growth. Ellwood disappeared from the collective consciousness of sociology very quickly under these circumstances, and the rapidity and completeness of Ellwood’s disappearance is grounds enough for interest. It is a sign of the extent to which the discipline changed, and a clue to what changed. But Ellwood is worth thinking about on his own, as a significant figure in the history of the discipline. He was the founder of two Ph. D. departments, at the University of Missouri and Duke University, and midwife to the founding of a third, at UCLA. He was President of the Institute Internationale de Sociologie, and leader of the critical 1935 International Congress of Sociology. He was also a public intellectual, whose books reached a wide audience and who wa