Professor Franklin H. Gidding’s sociology lectures at Columbia University often drifted off topic. As World War I drew to a close in 1918, Giddings increasingly voiced his disdain for German and Russian political policy. The classroom diatribes, which were not welcome by some students, displayed Giddings’ intellectual range and compelling speaking style but also revealed his at-times overbearing personality and dogmatic nature, according to Clarence H. Northcott, a scholar and author of a chapter on Giddings in An Introduction to the History of Sociology, published in 1948.
It was a mix of these traits that launched Giddings career as a pioneering American sociologist. He drew on varying intellectual influences, ranging from Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution to his work as a Union civil engineering student, to build his career in sociology. He employed scientific principles to produce an analysis of human society that helped move sociology into the realm of research science.
Before entering Union, Giddings studied the work of Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall. After leaving Union in 1875, he became a newspaper editor, writer, statistician and later a full-time professor and leading social scientist. From the mid-1890s until his death in 1931, Giddings authored several books in the then-fledgling field of sociology, became well known for his theory of “consciousness of kind” and is today considered one of the founders of American sociology.
“To sum up, Giddings approaches the social process from the standpoint of a psychologist who is a statistician and a scientist,” Northcott wrote.
Giddings was born in March 1855 in Sherman, Conn. to a well-known orthodox Congregationalist minister named Edward Jonathan Giddings. The younger Giddings did not follow his father’s path of religious instruction, but instead studied under his two grandfathers, and pursued surveying and mechanical drawing and the art of tanning, according to Ellsworth R. Fuhrman, who wrote Giddings’ entry in American National Biography.
Giddings entered Union in 1873 and departed in 1875 for a job as associate editor of the Winston Connecticut Herald. In 1888, he was awarded a degree as a member of the Class of 1877. Giddings was given an honorary Union degree in 1897 and returned to the College as a guest lecturer on at least one occasion.
In the mid-1880s, Giddings became known as a writer for two Springfield, Mass. newspapers and worked for the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics. He was also publishing articles in scholarly and nonacademic journals, which enjoyed wide readership. In 1888, future U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, invited Giddings to be a lecturer on politics, according to American National Biography.
In 1894 Giddings joined the faculty at Columbia, where he was the first full professor in sociology in the United States. He remained there as professor of sociology and the history of civilization for more than 35 years.
In the footnotes of Northcott’s book chapter on Giddings, he and book editor Harry Elmer Barnes, write:
“No other American sociologist could lecture with the power, conciseness and organization that Giddings could exhibit when he wished to do so, but he rarely conducted a course systematically, and at times, a course of lectures might bear little resemblance to the subject matter announced. That was especially true after 1914. In a certain sense, Giddings was an intellectual ‘war casualty.’ He was veritably obsessed with anti-Germanism, which after 1918, turned into anti-Bolshevism, and for years his lectures were more diatribes against his pet hates than calm sociological analysis. But, however little they might contribute to sociological clarification, they were always interesting and stimulating.”
Yet in much of his scholarly work, Giddings was a calm analyst who laid a foundation for hsi successors. [Editor's note: The printed magazine contained an error in this sentence.]
Giddings best-known contribution to sociology was the theory of consciousness of kind, which sought to explain the evolution of knowledge and society, according to Fuhrman.
“[Consciousness of kind] is that pleasurable state of mind which included organic sympathy, the perception of resemblance, conscious or reflective sympathy, affection, and the desire for recognition,” wrote Giddings in Elements of Sociology, published in 1898.
Consciousness of kind develops naturally among a group over a long period of time and dictates reaction to stimuli, according to Giddings. After humans developed language, Giddings theorized that the emotions connected with consciousness of kind converted the herd or pack into society, according to Northcott.
Giddings would go on to author several more books, some colored by his political beliefs, and others that were largely scientific, like Studies in the Theory of Human Society, published in 1924. He saw his work as a kind of psychology of society, based in statistical method, aimed at categorizing group behavior and providing a criticism that might help build a social ideal.