The Chicago School and Communication

Story

Cigarette paper back home, a subscription in America

June 1919. Mark Villchur, editor of the Russian-language paper Russkoye Slovo in New York, publishes the results of a survey of his readers. The question is simple: did you read newspapers in the old country? Of 312 replies, only 16 say “regularly”. Ten used to leaf through a paper now and then at the village administrative centre, and twelve subscribed to a weekly magazine. In America, all of them subscribe to or read Russian papers.

Some replies are more colourful still: people from Grodno, Minsk and Volhynia write that at home they used newspapers as cigarette paper, and that here they have become regular readers. Same paper, different job. A quarter of the readers also glance at American papers in English; some say they understand “only one word out of five”, others read only the headlines, because headlines are easy to follow.

The sociologist Robert Park used this survey both in his 1922 book and in his 1923 article. Our reading: because it shows something surprising; people who arrive in a new country do not stop reading, they start. Park’s explanation is short: news is urgent information used by a person trying to adjust to a new environment, and America offered a great deal to learn and habits to change. This lesson is the story of that idea and of the school that produced it.

Story

From one million to three: sociology steps out onto the street

In the 1890 census Chicago was the second-largest city in the United States: 1,099,850 people. In 1930: 3,376,438. More than a threefold rise in forty years. From 1890 to 1920, about three-quarters of Chicagoans were either immigrants or the children of immigrants; in 1900 the share approached 80 per cent. The immigrant population peaked in 1930: about 859,000 foreign-born plus 1.3 million children of immigrants, some 65 per cent of the city. The city’s newspapers matched: a later survey collected translations from the papers of Czech, Polish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish and many other communities.

In this city, in 1892, Albion Small founded the first sociology department in the United States; in 1895 he launched the American Journal of Sociology. In the period from about 1915 to 1935, social scientists at Chicago pioneered empirical research and a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods; today we call this the “Chicago School”.

Our interpretation: a city growing this fast, speaking this many languages, carried the question “what holds society together?” out of the pages of books and onto the street. The question of this lesson is: why did Chicago’s sociologists keep arriving at “communication” as the answer?

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The names and years you will meet in this lesson

Instead of memorising years, read them as “who answers which question?”; still, here is the skeleton:

• 1892 – Albion Small: the first sociology department in the United States, at Chicago.
• 1915 – Robert Park: the article “The City”; the city as a “laboratory”.
• 1916 – John Dewey: Democracy and Education; society exists in communication.
• 1918–1920 – W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki: The Polish Peasant in Europe and America; immigrants’ letters as data.
• 1921 – Park and Ernest Burgess: the textbook Introduction to the Science of Sociology.
• 1922 – Park: The Immigrant Press and Its Control.
• 1923 – Park: “The Natural History of the Newspaper”.
• 1925 – Park and Burgess: The City.
• 1927 – Dewey: The Public and Its Problems.
• 1928 – Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas: The Child in America; the “definition of the situation” theorem.
• 1938 – Louis Wirth: “Urbanism as a Way of Life”.
• 1940 – Park: “News as a Form of Knowledge”.

The order tells the story too: first the question of the city and the immigrant (Thomas, Park), then its communication side (the press, news), and last the city’s own theory (Burgess, Wirth).

Story

“Send us your letters”: 10 to 20 cents each

1. A strange advertisement appears in one of the Polish-language dailies, Dziennik Związkowy: anyone who has letters from the old country should send them to the advertiser; the aim is to show the nature of the Polish people. Ten to twenty cents will be paid per letter, and the letters will be returned. (Dziennik Związkowy was the daily paper of the Polish National Alliance.)

One reader, an immigrant with more than a hundred letters, writes a wary reply: is the reward real, will he get the letters back? The correspondence is valuable to him; when the war is over he expects money to collect or a farm to take over. “Send me a guarantee,” he says. In a letter two weeks later he writes that he trusts their generosity, and sends the letters.

The advertisers were W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, and the result was The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. The book contains series of letters; in one, someone living in Poland advises subscribing to a Polish weekly, Gazeta Świąteczna, saying that papers now print more truth because they appear without censorship. So the newspaper is inside the data, too.

For sociology this was a threshold: not only censuses and theories but documents that ordinary people wrote in their own words counted as data. A Turkish encyclopaedia entry says the study laid the foundation of qualitative research methods in American sociology.

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The core claim: society exists in communication

If you had to squeeze the Chicago School’s thinking on communication into one sentence: society is possible because people make something common, and the way to make it common is communication. So communication is not a tool added to society afterwards; it is society itself.

Park described this as a balance of two forces. Competition separates people: it brings an orderly distribution and a division of labour, and increases individuation. Communication builds understanding and cultural solidarity; it integrates. The two complement each other. Our interpretation: the city is one of the places where these two forces are most visible, and the city’s newspaper is communication’s most visible instrument. In 1915 Park calls the newspaper the great medium of communication within the city and writes that public opinion rests on the information it supplies.

Keep three ideas in mind:

1. Society = a common world. Without a common language, common news and common attention there is no “we”.
2. City = laboratory. Social processes appear enlarged there, so that is where they are studied.
3. News = a form of knowledge. A kind of knowledge with its own rules, between acquaintance and formal knowledge.

We will see in turn how this ambitious sentence works, where it struggles, and who criticised it.

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The city as laboratory: why the city?

The last sentences of Park’s 1915 article “The City” are the nearest thing to a Chicago School slogan. A great city lays bare, in a massive way, traits that usually stay hidden and suppressed in small communities: it shows the good and the evil in human nature “in excess”. For Park this justifies the view that treats the city as a “laboratory or clinic” in which human nature and social processes can be studied most conveniently and profitably.

The laboratory here is not a tightly controlled experimental room. Our reading: the city makes everything visible, and the observer can go to the street, the neighbourhood, the newspaper and look. Indeed, in the same article Park gives the researcher lists of questions; for example, in a neighbourhood, what is news, where does attention generally go, and which models are imitated? Two of those questions are about communication: news and attention are the signs of a community’s common world.

The same 1915 article also brings immigrants, social mobility, public opinion and the press into a single frame; so here “the city” is not only buildings but the way people tell each other things. That is why the word “communication” in the lesson title is not a later addition: at least in Park’s hands, urban sociology was communication sociology from the start.

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Glossary

• Chicago School: the community of sociologists who, between 1915 and 1935 at the University of Chicago, did empirical research on the city, migration and social order.
• Human ecology: applying to human relations the way of looking used for plant and animal communities; competition creates order, and the cultural order limits that competition.
• Social laboratory: seeing the city as the place where social processes can be observed enlarged.
• Thomas theorem: if people define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences.
• Urbanism: for Wirth, the way of life peculiar to the settlement of a relatively large, dense, permanent and socially heterogeneous population.
• Immigrant press: newspapers and magazines that immigrants publish in their own languages; Park’s subject.
• News as a form of knowledge: Park’s idea that news is a transient, talk-provoking kind of knowledge with a place of its own on the continuum between acquaintance and formal knowledge.
• Public opinion: for Park, the shared opinion that in the city rests on the information the newspaper supplies.

Most of this glossary comes alive with an example in the cards that follow.

Story

The warden of Dannemora and one sentence

The year is 1928. William I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, in the methods chapter of a thick book on child behaviour (The Child in America), give an extreme example: the warden of Dannemora prison refused to carry out a court order to let an inmate out for a time, because the man was too dangerous. The inmate had killed several people who talked to themselves in the street; from the movement of their lips he imagined they were insulting him and behaved accordingly.

Right after it comes this sentence: if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. Robert K. Merton later named the sentence the “Thomas theorem” and counted it a theorem basic to the social sciences.

The point is this: in reality nobody was insulting him. But what determined his behaviour was not the “objective” situation but how he defined it. That is why the Thomases argued that the researcher must record not only verifiable conditions but also how the person sees those conditions, because behaviour often depends on how the person defines the situation.

What it means for a communication course: rumours, headlines and conversation are the material through which people define a “situation”. Their truth matters, but so does how people come to believe them.

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The assumption: what is common becomes common through communication

The Chicago School’s idea of communication came from the philosopher John Dewey. In 1916 Dewey wrote that society not only continues to exist by transmission and communication; it “may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication”. Then a word play: between common, community and communication there is more than a verbal tie; people live in a community by virtue of the things they have in common, and the way they come to have things in common is communication. (In Turkish the play does not survive: the words for “common”, “community” and “communication” are not related.)

In 1921 Park and Burgess put this passage into their textbook and treated communication “as Dewey has defined the term”. In 1927 Dewey carried the same idea into politics: unless the “Great Society”, bound together by industry and technology, is converted into a “Great Community”, the public remains in eclipse, and only communication can create a Great Community.

At Michigan, Charles Horton Cooley in 1909 likewise defined communication as the mechanism through which human relations exist and develop, counting among it speech and writing but also printing, railways, telegraphs and telephones (this lesson only points to him; Cooley belongs to another lesson).

Our reading: this is a relative of what would later be called the ritual view. Communication is not only carrying information but building a common world; more in the The Ritual View of Communication: Carey lesson.

Myth check

Myth: “The immigrant newspaper keeps the immigrant foreign”

What people assume. An immigrant who reads a paper in his own language never learns about the new country; the immigrant press is a kind of “separate state”. In the years of the First World War this suspicion turned into legal control: an act of 6 October 1917 required that English translations of foreign-language items about the war and the government be filed with the postmaster.

What the evidence says. Park’s 1922 book asks the question as “brake or accelerator?” The editor of the Lithuanian paper Draugas argues that the foreign-language press separates communities and prevents assimilation; other editors say the paper helps immigrants, especially the first generation, to find their bearings in the American environment and to share in its intellectual, political and social life.

Park’s own conclusion: it depends on content. Depending on what it prints, the press can hasten or retard assimilation; it can turn the immigrant’s interest back towards the home country, but it can also introduce America to him and give him the material on which to build interest and affection. So the press is not in itself a “good” or “bad” factor; it is a bridge or a wall depending on what it says.

A note on limits (our assessment): Park reports this debate through editors’ views, surveys and observation; it is a descriptive study, not a numerical test of effects. Expecting a firm measurement of “brake” or “accelerator” from it would be a mistake; but it is a good warning against blaming the language itself.

Step by step

How does news integrate? Five steps

If we gather Park’s writings on news into one mechanism, a chain like this emerges (the sequence is our summary):

1. The small world. Village life rests on face-to-face relations: speech and neighbourly gossip. In the village, “everyone knows everything about everyone else.”
2. The city and the new environment. In the industrial city the immigrant is suddenly in a wide, unfamiliar environment. The urgent information used for adjusting in that environment is called “news”.
3. The newspaper as common ground. The newspaper is the great medium of communication within the city; public opinion rests on the information it supplies. The modern newspaper is a product of city life.
4. Events are selected and talked about. News is the kind of event that will make people talk; it is usually limited to events bringing sudden and decisive change.
5. Shared understanding and participation. News circulates as far as its message is understood and seems important; the more it circulates, the more the members of a society take part in common political action.

In short: in Park’s lens news makes a “bond”, not an “effect”; it is the mechanism that creates the city society’s common attention and common talk (our summary).

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Acquaintance or knowledge about? News is neither

Is knowing a friend the same as having knowledge about her? The philosopher and psychologist William James separated the two in 1890: to be acquainted with a thing (acquaintance with) is to be limited to the bare impression it makes; knowledge about it (knowledge about) is to know its relations. Our example: knowing the taste of a soup is one thing; knowing which kitchen it comes from and how it is made is another.

In 1940 Park applied James’s distinction to news. For him “knowledge about” is formal knowledge; “acquaintance” is unsystematic, intuitive knowledge close to common sense. These form a continuum, and news has a place of its own on it: a transient, quickly ageing kind of knowledge. News is the kind that “will make people talk”, it is usually limited to events that bring sudden and decisive change, and its function is to orient people and society in an actual world.

Why does this matter? Because news is different both from a history book’s lasting account of the world and from a neighbour’s knowing you: it is the knowledge that tells us where the world stands this morning. The same knowledge tomorrow is “old”. Chicago’s thinking on communication stands out for taking news seriously as such a concrete and transient kind of knowledge.

Step by step

Reading the city as an ecosystem: Burgess’s rings

The idea of human ecology works like this. For Park the kind of analysis used for plant and animal communities can be applied to human relations too; competition creates order, and the cultural order limits that competition on economic, political and moral levels. Applied to a city:

1. Competition divides space. People and functions compete for room in the city.
2. Culture limits competition. The contest never runs without rules; customs, laws and morals shape its form.
3. Rings appear. In The City (1925) Ernest Burgess drew a city’s growth as rings expanding outward from the central business district; the model came from observing Chicago.
4. Communication settles too. Wirth’s 1938 article lists, among the elements that explain the dominance of cities, the press, radio stations, theatres, libraries and publishing centres; so media gather where population concentrates.

Do not memorise the rings: the model was later criticised (see the critique card). The communication side of the lesson is this: a city is not just a place but a density of communication; media and news are part of the ecological order.

Lab

Lab 1: read a documented immigrant-press case

Besides Park’s book we have another heap of documents compiled from Chicago’s own newspapers: the Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey. It was set up in 1936 as an Illinois Works Progress Administration project sponsored by the Chicago Public Library; it produced about 120,000 typewritten pages of translations from Chicago’s foreign-language papers, was ended in 1941 and published in 1942. Workers selected articles by subject codes, translated and classified them; editors reviewed the translations. The Newberry Library later digitized the archive. The project’s question was how Chicago came to develop as it did, especially assimilation and cultural diffusion.

Exercise (a reading exercise). If you can reach the Newberry Library’s online archive, pick one article and ask four questions: (1) Whom is the piece addressing? (2) Does it give the reader urgent information for the new city and new job, in Park’s sense? (3) What is there about the old country? (4) Can you conclude from this one piece that “the press speeds up” or “slows down” assimilation?

The answer to the fourth question is no: one example is not evidence. Also, the pieces are a selection: the project chose by predetermined subject codes, and the pieces are translations. Before using a source as evidence, asking who chose what and why is the basic habit of any archive work.

Lab

Lab 2 (exercise): map your neighbourhood’s information channels

This is an exercise: it collects no data but builds a habit of observation. It is inspired by the list of questions in Park’s 1915 article: “What is news in this neighbourhood? Where does attention generally go?”

Choose an area of your own neighbourhood (or dormitory, or village) and, in twenty minutes, sketch this:

1. Count the channels. Who tells whom, and how? Notice boards, shopkeepers, school, associations, places of worship, a neighbours’ group, a local page, the headman’s or caretaker’s announcements, a messaging group… write your own list.
2. Whom does each reach? Note whom each channel reaches and whom it leaves out (language, age, occupation, computer access).
3. What kind of information flows? Urgent information (a water cut), chatter, an official notice?
4. Look for gaps. Which resident might get news from no channel at all?
5. Write a one-sentence thesis: “In this neighbourhood, news travels like this…”

Warning: this exercise generates a hypothesis, not evidence. Do not write down other people’s personal information; do not copy the content of group messages, only note the type of channel and whom it reaches. Researchers in Chicago also marked on maps the places where particular behaviours occurred; spot maps and statistics were among the school’s tools.

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Evidence: Park’s press study and the test of the war years

The Immigrant Press and Its Control (1922) was part of a series called “Americanization Studies”, funded by the Carnegie Corporation; according to the foreword, the material had been gathered by the series’ immigrant-press division. So Park did not work alone at a desk but with the material of a research bureau.

One striking part of the book covers the war years. In Park’s account the first serious public attempt to control the immigrant press was made in the First World War, as part of the fight against enemy propaganda. Drawing on hearing records in the Post Office Department’s files, Park writes that the number of foreign-language papers actually denied Post Office services was very small, “probably not more than ten”; some newspaper offices were raided by the Department of Justice, but the Post Office Department suppressed no paper. Moreover, between 5 October 1917 and 14 January 1919, 650 foreign-language papers were given permits to publish without filing translations.

How strong is this evidence? Our assessment: it is a description based on official records; it shows what the state did, not how the press affected its readers. On the press’s effect Park is content with editors’ statements and surveys like Villchur’s. So Chicago’s strength lies less in causal claims tested with numbers than in describing “where, who and how?” with documents; it should be judged not as “right” or “wrong” but by which question it answers.

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Criticism: the rings, urbanism and the language of the time

Three criticisms of the Chicago School are often repeated.

1. The model is too simple and too American. Burgess’s rings were developed for American cities; they do not fit other settings, for example pre-industrial European cities where the centre had high status; and the separation of workplace from residence became general only in the twentieth century.
2. Wirth’s urbanism and Fischer. In 1975 Claude Fischer wrote that Wirth’s theory had been eclipsed by a view that denies ecological factors, but that this view fails to explain the “unconventionality” of urban life. On his own model, population concentration leads to a diversity of subcultures, strengthens them and fosters diffusion among them. Fischer does not throw Wirth away: he brings the variable of size back in a different form.
3. The language of the time. Park’s book appeared in a series called “Americanization Studies”, and assimilation was for him both an observation and a goal. Our reading: when assimilation is framed as a one-way goal there is a risk of treating the immigrant’s language and identity as an obstacle. Park’s text partly resists that risk: the immigrant’s language and memories are part of his personality, not baggage to be lost on the way; assimilation comes more readily when there are no mental conflicts.

The defenders’ reply? For this lesson we have not been able to verify a defence; in these sources there are only the criticisms. An honest conclusion: use Chicago’s concepts (ecology, urbanism, assimilation) in their historical context, knowing their limits.

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Today: communication infrastructure and the “storytelling neighbourhood”

Park’s immigrant-press question is alive today. In 2001 Ball-Rokeach, Kim and Matei studied seven residential areas in Los Angeles, in old and new immigrant communities, with multilingual data collection, and asked: what turns a person from the occupant of a house into a member of a neighbourhood? What they found: the most important factor in belonging was an active and integrated “storytelling system” that connected residents, community organizations and local media.

This can be read as an indirect descendant of Park’s idea (our interpretation): community is built by shared news and shared narrative. But two cautions. First, the study is from 2001; its abstract mentions neither today’s messaging groups nor social media. So saying “a group chat is a storytelling system” rests not on evidence but on our own reasoning. Second, the finding should not be read simply as “the more local media, the more belonging”: what is stressed is that the system is integrated and active.

We can extend the same reasoning to the Thomas theorem (again our own reasoning): a rumour or a headline produces consequences once enough people take it to be real; a neighbourhood group is a channel that can carry a rumour fast. Chicago’s two ideas, that shared information builds community and that definitions shape behaviour, feed each other in today’s networks, too.

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This is how exams ask it

Typical question patterns

• “Which sociologist studied the immigrant press and treated news as a form of knowledge?” → Robert E. Park (The Immigrant Press and Its Control, 1922; “News as a Form of Knowledge”, 1940).
• “Whose sentence is ‘If men define situations as real…’?” → W. I. Thomas (with Dorothy Swaine Thomas, 1928); the name is Merton’s.
• “Whose is the concentric-ring model?” → Ernest Burgess (1925).
• “Urbanism as a way of life?” → Louis Wirth (1938).
• “The link between communication and community?” → John Dewey (1916, 1927).

Tempting wrong answers

• Attributing The Polish Peasant to Park: the work is by Thomas and Znaniecki.
• Reading the Thomas theorem as “if people believe something false, the outcome is false”: the theorem says the consequences are real even if the belief is false.
• Treating “Chicago = qualitative, Columbia = quantitative” as fixed: see the nuances in the deep card.
• Thinking Park was born an academic: he spent 1887–1898 as a journalist.

Alternative names. In Turkish sources the school appears as “Chicago Okulu”, “Şikago Okulu”, “Chicago Sosyoloji Ekolü”, “ekoloji okulu” or “ekolojik okul”. Human ecology is “insan ekolojisi” and the city as laboratory “sosyal laboratuvar”. One Turkish source gives Wirth’s article the title “Bir Yaşam Biçimi Olarak Kentlileşme”; this lesson’s own Turkish term is “kentlilik”. These are typical exam patterns; whichever source you read, run the question through the filter “who answers which question?”

Summary

Summary card: one sentence from Chicago

• Context: fast-growing Chicago full of immigrants; the first sociology department in 1892; 1915–1935 the “Chicago School”.
• Core claim: society exists in communication (Dewey); communication integrates, competition separates (Park).
• City = laboratory (Park 1915): fieldwork, maps, letters, newspapers.
• The immigrant press: brake or accelerator? Park: it depends on content. In wartime, a translation requirement; in the Post Office records only very few papers were actually denied service.
• News is a form of knowledge (Park 1940): on the continuum between acquaintance and formal knowledge, a transient, talk-provoking, orienting kind of knowledge (from James’s distinction).
• The Thomas theorem (1928): if you define situations as real, they are real in their consequences; the belief need not be true. Merton named it; the bank parable is fiction.
• Human ecology and Burgess’s rings: the city shaped by competition; criticism: specific to American cities, too simple.
• Wirth: the city = a large, dense, permanent, differentiated population; he also carried a worry about the media.
• Today: the “storytelling system” (Ball-Rokeach et al. 2001); for social media, only our own reasoning.
• Exam traps: Park–Thomas (immigrant press or letters?); the “Chicago = qualitative” shortcut.