Charles Merriam's presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 1920 urged the collaboration of various social sciences in the study of politics, particularly stressing the importance of statistics and psychology, and emphasizing the “good works” consequences of his scientific approach.¹

It was really a rather homely talk. Twenty years after Merriam's programmatic statement, the University of Chicago's Political Science Department had produced 80 Ph.D.'s, sending them to teach all around the country. (In all its previous 30 years, it had only produced 13 Ph.D.'s.) By the early 1950s, the department had fertilized Yale's Department of Political Science through its staffing of the Institute of International Studies. It also provided scholars for the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia when William T. R. Fox moved there with several of his students. The Yale Institute took part of its University of Chicago contingent with it when it transferred to Princeton, where it became the Center of International Studies; it also supplied staff for the Institute's offshoot at MIT and for the RAND Corporation, when Bernard Brodie and Alexander George joined the social sciences team.

The scholars trained in the Chicago department, and their students, have enriched the entire corpus of political science—in American politics (e.g., V. O. Key, David Truman); comparative politics (e.g., Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba, Lucian Pye, Myron Weiner); constitutional law (e.g., Herman Pritchett); public administration (e.g., L. D. White, Avery Leiserson, Herbert Simon); and international relations (e.g., Frederick Schuman, William T. R. Fox, Klaus Knorr, Bernard Brodie). A very large proportion of the seminal scholars of the 1950s and 1960s were directly or indirectly products of the Chicago school. The leading texts on American political parties, interest groups, and comparative politics were authored by University of Chicago Ph.D.'s. Six of the 20 presidents of the American Political Science Association from 1954 until 1974 came from the Chicago school.

Taken all in all, this is a very big impact—and one without an obvious explanation. Why so?

Truly it is difficult to explain the rise of the Chicago school of political science, which occurred fully 20 years before behavioralism broke out all over. The Chicago school (started by Merriam, his colleague Harold Gosnell, and Merriam's student Harold Lasswell) had no help from international politics. It was a time when democracy was being crushed on the European continent and when freedom of inquiry and scientific research seemed to have little future in the scheme of things. When behavioralism attained national and general proportions, it was after World War II, in the middle of the great scientific revolutions of nuclear physics and molecular biology, with the threatening Soviet competition of Sputnik overhead.²

It was over-determined. In the post–World War II decades, there was plenty of necessary and sufficient causation for the behavioral revolution. But between the World Wars, there seems only to have been Merriam—with a great need for power and creativity, on the one hand, and on the other, a frontier university with a reputation to make and a department long dominated by a repressive and absentee chairman, who had suddenly vacated.

In 1920, Merriam was 47 years old, not too long returned from his military career in Italy. With his political aspirations crushed in a failed mayoral campaign against a corrupt and ruthless Republican political boss, Merriam had the choice of returning to Columbia with endowed-chair distinction or taking over the Chicago department, which had dwindled to almost nothing, and making something of it. He chose the latter, and it is the extraordinary imaginative effort of this individual that can explain the rise of the Chicago school. Merriam had skills, charms, and forms of passive aggression that enabled him to sculpt statistical, psychoanalytical, social-psychological professionals out of ungainly graduate students recruited from the children of small-town clergymen, petty retailers, and Eastern European immigrants. Personality, chance, and choice had a great deal to do with his success. And it was not a very probable thing at all. Like the asteroid impact on the Earth that ushered in the Cenozoic era and provided niches for the development of mammals and, ultimately, humankind, the early rise of behavioral political Robert Maynard Hutchins. This young Yale Law dean came to Chicago as its fifth president, in 1929, bringing with him a point of view and a number of philosophical colleagues who caused consternation among the great pragmatists (George Mead, Arthur Murphy, et al.) then dominating the Philosophy Department. Three of the leading philosophers in the department resigned in the immediate aftermath of Hutchins's arrival. A slower attrition began as Hutchins proceeded to block the academic advancement of the more empirically inclined social scientists. Merriam was in the last decade of his academic tenure, and no longer energetic and entrepreneurial. Gosnell and Lasswell, denied professorships, left the university. During the same period, a German refugee scholar—Leo Strauss, a science at the raw, neo Gothic precincts of the University of Chicago, where seminude women had shortly before danced the shimmy on the Midway of the Great Columbian Exposition of 1893, was chancy indeed.

Another historical anomaly is the fact that the Chicago school's influence is recognized everywhere but at the University of Chicago itself. At the 1991 celebration of the university's founding, it broke my heart when the historians there pointed with pride at two of the university's social science departments, identifying them as Chicago “schools” that had led their disciplines to discovery and knowledge, and had conferred great and lasting honor on the university. These were the departments of Economics and Sociology. Economics at Chicago is identified with neoclassical economic theory and the names of Frank Knight and Jacob Viner, as well as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and other Nobel Prize winners. The term Chicago boys evokes Friedman and his students, active in Latin American economies in the 1970s and 1980s. Sociology at Chicago is associated with the names of Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, Louis Wirth, and, more recently, James Coleman.

But even in the special 100th-birthday issue (October 1991) of the University of Chicago Magazine, no reference was made to the Political Science Department as an important school. Political science at Chicago from 1920 through 1940 became recognized as a school in national and international social science circles. The university's own failure to acknowledge this renown at the celebration of Chicago's first century calls for explanation. Why has the university turned the portraits of Chicago political science luminaries—Merriam, Gosnell, Lasswell—to the wall, despite these scholars' great and enduring accomplishments?

This amnesia covers a painful trauma, for Chicago not only was the site of the earliest unambiguous emergence of behavioral political science (though not called such), but it has also been the major center of antibehavioral science—a purely humanistic, philosophical political science, a brand fostered by Robert Maynard Hutchins. This young Yale Law dean came to Chicago as its fifth president, in 1929, bringing with him a point of view and a number of philosophical colleagues who caused consternation among the great pragmatists (George Mead, Arthur Murphy, et al.) then dominating the Philosophy Department. Three of the leading philosophers in the department resigned in the immediate aftermath of Hutchins's arrival. A slower attrition began as Hutchins proceeded to block the academic advancement of the more empirically inclined social scientists. Merriam was in the last decade of his academic tenure, and no longer energetic and entrepreneurial. Gosnell and Lasswell, denied professorships, left the university. During the same period, a German refugee scholar—Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who believed that all political truth was to be found once and for all in the classics of political theory, and a vilifier of Max Weber—was appointed to the Political Science Department. He anathematized what he called the scientistic leanings of the Merriam school. The Strauss group created a sect in the department that tended to prejudice any effort to recognize the significance of the Merriam school's achievements in the interwar years. When it came around to the university's 100th-anniversary celebration, a fog of silence surrounded the history of the 1920s–1940s.

Thus, there is still a mural waiting to be painted of Charles E. Merriam as a Midwestern kind of Edmund Wilson, delivering a Presbyterian New Aspects of Politics as his version of To the Finland Station.³

In this magnificent mural, Merriam is followed closely by Lasswell, mouth wide open, emitting his great parsimonious equation: p}d}r=P (private emotions displaced upon public objects and rationalized in terms of public interest equals politics). Gosnell is talking to a housewife in the interviewing phase of his experimental nonvoting study.⁴ And Schuman is defying the wrathful Walgreen as the Midwestern drugstore tycoon seeks to drive Schuman out of the university and across the Midway toward 60th Street, which is bedecked with conservatively dressed law students.