William Graham Sumner American sociologist

William Graham Sumner

October 30, 1840 — April 12, 1910

“Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.” –W. G. Sumner

William Graham Sumner was born in Paterson New Jersey on October 30, 1840, the son of Thomas Sumner and Sarah Graham. Although not formally educated, his father was a supporter of free trade and temperance. When Sumner was eight his mother died, leaving him and his two siblings in the care of an affection-less stepmother. His parents stressed the values of sobriety, autonomy, and personal responsibility. These ideals had a significant influence on his direction and subsequent works. After graduating from high school in Hartford where he spent most of his childhood, Sumner attended Yale University and obtained his degree in 1863. He then went on to study in Germany, Switzerland, and at Oxford, where he prepared for the Episcopalian clergy. Sumner returned to Yale as a classics tutor from 1866-1869 and was ordained a minister of the Episcopal Church in July of 1869. He served as a minister in the Church of the Redeemer in Morristown, New Jersey from 1870-1872, where he struggled with the conflicts between religion and scientific positivism. This clash between his instincts of individual freedom and the necessary checks on “progress” became visible in some of his later writings. In 1871 he married Jeannie Elliott with whom he had three sons (one died in infancy). He spoke rarely of his wife and family, but his views on the value of monogamy and family are seen in his later writings. In September of 1872, Sumner began a position as professor of political economy and social science at Yale. There he became part of the “Young Yale” movement, a reformist group opposing traditional classroom recitation. Sumner was one of the institution’s most popular and controversial teachers. He became an instrumental figure in the reformation of the American university system, from the old “divinity-classics” towards modernism.

In 1873 Sumner entered into the political arena, serving as New Haven alderman until 1876. In the fall of 1877, he sat in on the electoral commission to investigate fraud in New Orleans during the 1876 presidential election. Deeply disheartened by both experiences, Sumner curbed his political activities to an extensive term on the Connecticut State Board of Education (1882-1910).

As a classical economist, Sumner supported an extreme laissez-faire policy, opposing any governmental actions that obstructed natural economic affairs. His “A History of American Currency” (1874) supported the preservation of a sound currency against the use of silver. In 1878 Sumner turned his attention to the turbulence in the labor movement, contesting labor unions as harmful monopolies. On August 22, Sumner testified before a Representatives concerned with investigating the Causes of the General Depression in Labor and Business. In “Protectionism: The –ism that Teaches that Waste Makes Wealth” (1885) and "Lectures on the History of Protection" (1883), which he delivered before the International Free-Trade Alliance, he defined the tariff as a tax that benefits some Americans over others.

In the early 1880s, Sumner received criticism from Yale President Noah Porter for the use of Herbert Spencer’s Study of Sociology (1873) as a classroom textbook. Although he agreed to use other texts, the ensuing battle for academic freedom gained wide publicity and popularity for Sumner. In 1883 Sumner published “What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other”, an attack on attempts to regulate the economy and assuage social problems. (also see excerpts from the essay here and here)

After an extensive absence from public life due to a decline in health, Sumner returned to the public eye as Vice President of the Anti-Imperialist League in 1899. His speech, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain”, was delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale University on January 16, 1899. During this time he was also a member of the Philippine Independence Committee. In his best-known encyclopedic book Folkways (1906), Sumner added the terms “folkways” and “mores” to the vocabularies of American sociologists. He believed that these were the most powerful influences on human behavior, even when irrational. A Social Darwinist and Conservative in thought, Sumner worked continuously in charting the evolution of human customs, folkways and mores. He believed that these forces, developed naturally through the course of evolution, made any attempts for social reform useless. Sumner advocated that humanity could only survive in an environment untouched by attempts to change the “natural laws of social development”. Trained in the ideals of inductive empiricism, Sumner’s concepts were based on observations of particulars. Sumner defined the concept of ethnocentrism, the attitudes of superiority concerning one’s own group in comparison to others.