William Isaac Thomas

Biography
William Isaac Thomas was born on August 13, 1863 in Russell County, Virginia, the son
of a Methodist minister of Pennsylvania Dutch descent. His family moved to Knoxville,
Tennessee, the seat of the University of Tennessee, when he was a boy, because his father
wanted to improve the educational prospects for his seven children.

From 1880, Thomas studied literature and classics at the University of Tennessee, where
he obtained a B.A. degree in 1884. He became adjunct professor in English and Modern
Languages there. He also taught courses in Greek, Latin, French, German, and natural
history. At the same time, he developed an interest in ethnology and social science, reading
Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology. In 1888, Thomas married Harriet Park.

In 1888/1889, Thomas went to Germany to further his studies. He attended Humboldt

University in Berlin and Georg August University of Göttingen. There he also furthered his
interest in ethnology and sociology under the influence of German scholars such as Wilhelm
Wundt.

Upon his return to the United States in 1889, he taught as professor of English and, from
1894, professor of sociology at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. Having been invited to
teach a class in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1894, he moved there permanently
the following year and pursued graduate studies in sociology and anthropology at the newly-
founded department of sociology. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1896, with a dissertation entitled
On a Difference in the Metabolism of the Sexes.

For the next almost 25 years, Thomas taught sociology and, to a lesser extent,
anthropology at the University of Chicago, becoming instructor in 1895, assistant professor in
1896, associate professor in 1900, and eventually full professor in 1910. From 1895 until
1917, he also co-edited the American Journal of Sociology.

In 1907, Thomas published his first major work, Sex and Society. In spite of
showing biological bias that would today be considered sexist (such as "Anthropologists ...
regard women as intermediate between the child and the man") it was a progressive
publication considering the intellectual setting of its time. In particular, he fervently called for
an end the subjection of women in society, speculating that whether women's "capacity for
intellectual work is not under equal conditions greater than in man" due to the "superior
cunning" and "superior endurance of women."

In 1908, he received a substantial grant from Helen Culver to finance his research on the
life and culture of immigrants to the U.S. Managing the Helen Culver fund until 1918
enabled him to undertake several journeys to Europe in order to study the background of East
European immigrant groups.

In 1913, during one of his journeys to Poland, Thomas met the Polish sociologist Florian
Znaniecki, who became Thomas's co-author on their monumental work The Polish Peasant in
Europe and America (1918-1920). Lewis Coser called this "the earliest major landmark of
American sociological research." In it, Thomas and Znaniecki put forward a biographical
approach to understanding culture in general which remained influential until this day, as
well as an approach to understanding ethnicity in particular. In many respects this work was
ahead of its time, but it is currently being rediscovered in the context of transnational studies
in migration.

In The Polish Peasant, Thomas described the difficult situation in Poland, and the reasons
why many immigrants decide to come to America. As families try to adjust to a new life, they
encounter numerous problems. Among others, the immigrants face new values, with
individualism as the most exalted one. The clash soon arises between parents, who try to keep
their traditional values and close family ties, and their children who grow up in a new
environment. “Children brought with the family or added to it in America do not acquire the
traditional attitude of familial solidarity, but rather American individualistic ideals, while the
parents remain unchanged” (Thomas and Znaniecki 1958, 104).

Thomas led a "bohemian" life, was often seen in the Chicago art scene, and made no
secret to his being attracted to women. His lifestyle did not conform to the image of a
respectable professor and made him a controversial figure among his colleagues. In 1918, the
FBI arrested Thomas under the Mann Act, which prohibits "interstate transport of females for
immoral purposes," while in the company of one Mrs. Granger, the wife of an army officer
with the American forces in France. Some speculate that Thomas' arrest was an intrigue
schemed by the FBI, which at that time was observing his wife Harriet for her pacifist
activities. Although Thomas was acquitted of the charge in court, his career was irreversibly
damaged. The university immediately dismissed him, and the Chicago University Press,
which had already published the first two volumes of his The Polish Peasant, quit the
contract, so that the remaining three volumes had to be published by a Boston publisher.

After the scandal, Thomas withdrew to New York City. He never managed to obtain a
tenured position again. From 1923 to 1928, he lectured at the New School for Social
Research. Incidentally, Thorstein Veblen, who had co-founded the school in 1919, had fallen
from grace with the academic establishment for similar reasons. In 1927, Thomas was made
president of the American Sociological Association, thanks to the support of a younger
generation of scholars. This was, however, a purely honorary position for one year which did
not restore Thomas' official career.

In 1935, after his divorce from Harriet Park, Thomas married Dorothy Swaine, 36 years
his junior. In 1936, Pitirim A. Sorokin, chairman of the department of sociology at Harvard
University, invited Thomas as visiting lecturer, and Thomas lectured there until 1937. After
that, Thomas gradually withdrew into retirement in New Haven, then New York, and finally
Berkeley, California, where he died in 1947.

Thomas Theorem
Formulated in 1928, the Thomas theorem is a sociological theory formulated by
William Isaac Thomas, and his wife, Dorothy Thomas. The Thomas theorem states that,

"If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

This theory, which has influenced several other sociological theories, was first
suggested by the Thomas couple in their book, The Child in America, in 1928.
No notice of the theorem was taken in any of the reviews of The child in America that
appeared in the three principal American sociological journals of the time - the American
Journal of Sociology (which was then not only produced and edited at the University of
Chicago but was also the official journal of the American Sociological Society), Sociul
Forces (at the University of North Carolina), and Sociology and Social Research (at the
University of Southern California). But soon afterward, as we shall have occasion to see in
detail, Kimball Young, the prolific author of textbooks in social psychology and sociology
then at the University of Wisconsin, gave the theorem special notice by selecting it as an
epigraph for chapters in two successive textbooks; one, in his widely adopted Social
Psychology (Young 1930:397) and the other, in his edited volume, Social Attitudes (Young
1931:lOO). The Young epigraphs evidently become an early conduit for diffusion of the
quoted sentence. At any rate, the very next year, the omnivorous sociologist Howard p.]
Becker, was interpolating the sentence twice in his amplified and Americanized edition of
Leopold von Wiese’s Allgemeine Soziologie ([1924] 1932:34,79) and faithfully reporting
that it was being quoted from Young’s Social Psychology.
The Thomas Theorem means that the outcome of a situation depends upon an
individual's perception of it, and not on the situation by itself. Our behavior depends not on
the objective reality of a situation but on our subjective interpretation of reality. The
consequences and results of behavior make it real. People perceive reality differently, and
when they decide how they are going to view a person or a situation, they act accordingly.
Since we all perceive reality differently, our reactions differ. Our definition of a situation as
good or bad, to be embraced or avoided, dictates our response to it.

Reference:
W. I. Thomas. (2016, January 25). Retrieved August 2, 2018, from
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/W._I._Thomas

The Thomas Theorem and The Matthew Effect. Robert K. Merton. Social Forces, December
1995, 74(2):379-424.