austin porterfield and leonard cain and ellsworth faris and texas christian university and university of chicago

Though the material in this essay, which reflects on the first three chapters of Leonard Cain's suggestive biography of his mentor, is possibly the stuff of the "arcanologist" (I just coined the term), it really gives a window not only into the early life of Porterfield but also into the difficulties faced by the earliest generation of American sociologists as they sought to find their location and affirmation in American higher education. This essay will consider each topic briefly.

Porterfield's Origins

Leonard Cain is largely dependent on family reminiscences and some of Porterfield's correspondence for knowledge of his earliest days. Born in 1896, he was the 9th of 11 children of Tom and Margaret Porterfield on the border between Izard and Fulton County, AR, in Ozark country just south of the MO border. Having borne 11 children, his mother, who had married at 15, quickly went to her heavenly reward in 1909 and was replaced by wife # 2 who bore Tom six more children before she, too, died in her 40s. Porterfield's family belonged to the Church of Christ, and he wryly tells of how they got along well with their Baptist neighbors, sharing everything with them except views of heaven. As befits the sociologist he became, Porterfield made charts of his family of origin, showing numbers of children living and dead, grandchildren born to each sibling, with a narrative listing causes of death among those who had died. He was aware of the limitations in medical knowledge in his family, and Cain speculates that Austin's later interest in medical sociology may be traced back to the inadequate knowledge of theories of germs and bacteria which claimed so many members of his and the succeeding generation in his family.

Porterfield graduated from HS at 19, briefly tried to make a career as a book salesman (Cain mentions his unsuccessful attempt to peddle Horatio Alger books in rural AR), and then, after marrying a woman two years his senior in 1917, was utterly committed to attaining his bachelor, master's and doctoral degrees. Three children came along in the five or so years after marriage, but Austin didn't get his Ph. D. until 1937, a situation which resulted in his children's living a rather vagabond existence as they schlepped over the South, Midwest and East until Austin had completed his academic work and accepted a position at TCU in 1937. Leonard tells the story with panache and skill, and provides several quotations which would repay much further reflection.

Ellsworth Faris

Most provocative and, as far as I know, reflective of groundbreaking research (from the "Tomlinson" files in the TCU special collections) was Leonard's story of the early days of sociology at TCU and especially the murky story about Ellsworth Faris, who in the 1920s became a world-renowned sociologist at the University of Chicago. Faris was himself the son of a Church of Christ minister and had spend several years around the turn of the 20th century in setting up a mission school in the Congo. After his return to the States, Faris, who graduated from TCU before it was called TCU (it originated as "Add-Ran College"--named after the first letters of two sons of the founder-- about 35 miles outside of Fort Worth and then had moved to Waco early in the 20th century), took up a position teaching philosophy and religion at the college. Psychology was just beginning to emerge as a discipline out of philosophy and religion, and Faris taught several courses in theology, philosophy and the psychology of religious experience between about 1906 and 1911. Interestingly enough, the earliest sociology courses at TCU were taught throught the economics and political science area because sociology was at first concerned with what we might call social problems or problems of inequality and deprivation.

In any case, Faris was a very popular teacher, amassing large numbers of students who gratefully recounted his skill in bringing them knowledge of the modern world. However, in 1908 questions about Faris' orthodoxy began to emerge among some of the trustees. The one who seemed to fuel the suspicion was Lucas Charles Brite (1860-1941), a wealty Marfa rancher who had himself only joined the Church of Christ in the 1890s but quickly made himself known on the Board of Trustees. Faris was required to answer eight pointed questions on his religious beliefs in 1908 which seemed adequate at the time, but then these eight questions turned into twenty-one questions and Faris saw that the handwriting might be on the wall.

The crowning blow came in 1911, and that for two reasons. First, the college had burned in 1910, and the trustees decided to move it from Waco to Fort Worth. Low enrollments and financial vulnerability may have emboldened trustees like Brite to make a move against a popular professor whose orthodoxy might be slightly questionable by the rancher- turned theologian Brite. Second, as Porterfield's 1973 oral history discloses, he believed that Faris was fired as a condition of TCU's accepting a large ($25,000) gift from Brite in 1911 to help rebuild the campus and begin thinking about a separate divinity school. Faris left shortly thereafter (he was listed as "on leave" in 1911-12), and Brite went on to give lots more money to TCU, which today boasts a Divinity School named after him--at which my "liberal" colleague in the 1980s (see previous essay) got a position.

Conclusion

Thus, by the time that Porterfield arrived at TCU in 1937, he did so against a backdrop of this removal/dismissal of Faris a generation earlier. Brite was still on the board, though he died in 1941, but his widow continued as a trustee well into the 1960s. Already, Leonard Cain shows that he knows how to tell quite a story.

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