Bolender.com

The Person

Robert Ezra Park was born on February 14, 1864 in Harveyville, Penn- sylvania. Soon after his birth his family moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, where the young Park grew up on the Mississippi River as the son of a prosperous businessman. Like Veblen, Cooley, and Mead, he is a product of the Middle Border. After his graduation from the local high school and despite the opposition of his father, Park went to the University of Minnesota. After one year there, he transferred to the University of Michigan.

At Ann Arbor, Park was fortunate to find an inspiring teacher, the young John Dewey, and to become a member of a group of like-minded students who discussed the social issues of the day in the spirit of the reforming ideas then spreading all over the Midwest. Dewey introduced Park to a remarkable man, Franklin Ford, who was to have a decisive influence on his subsequent career. Ford had been a newspaperman and had reported in detail on the vagaries of the stock market and the impact of news on that market. He had come to see stock prices as a reflection of public opinion shaped by the news, and was therefore led to infer that with more adequate reporting, general public opinion could be made to respond to current events in as accurate a manner as the stock market. Much like some later pollsters and survey analysts, Ford believed that if the changes in public opinion could be gauged with precision, "the historical process would be appreciably stepped up, and progress would go forward steadily, without the interruption and disorder of depression or violence, and at a rapid pace."

Ford and Park planned a new kind of newspaper, to be called Thought News, which would register as well as influence movements of public opinion by more accurate presentation of the news. The paper never reached publica- tion, but Park's views on the crucial importance of the news, the media of communication, and the influence of public opinion were largely shaped by his conversations with Franklin Ford.

From Coser, 1977:366-367.

(Special acknowledgement to Larry R. Ridener and The Dead Sociologists' Society) http://raven.jmu.edu/~ridenelr/personal/VITA.HTML