History of Psychology Copyright 1998 by the Educational
Publishing Foundation
1998, vol.1 no. 1. 52-68. 1093-4510/98/S3AXI
GORDON ALLPORT, CHARACTER, AND THE
"CULTURE
OF PERSONALITY," 1897-1937
Ian A. M. Nicholson
This article examines the cultural
context of early American personality psychology through a consideration of the
early career of Gordon Allport. Between 1921 and 1937, Allport was among the
leading figures in the movement to establish personality as a research category
in American psychology. Far from being a strictly scientific concern, Allport's
project was deeply embedded in the cultural politics of the age. Of particular
importance was the gradual erosion of the language of character and the self-sacrificing,
morally grounded self that it supported. Allport's "psychology of
personality" helped fuel this trend while simultaneously attempting to
resist it. His experience illustrates the elasticity and moral ambiguity of the
newly emerging category of personality.
In recent years, a
number of historians have documented a pronounced change in the language of
American selfhood.1 Beginning in the late 19th century
and continuing into the 1920s, Americans moved from a language of
"character" to a language of "personality." According to
most historians, this shift was no linguistic trifle: The emergence of
personality and the decline of character signaled the
development of a new kind of American self. This was a self for an
industrialized and urbanized age: expressive, adaptable, and morally
unencumbered. The cultural shift from character to personality coincided with
the emergence of a new object of psychological investigation: personality.
Starting in the early teens and continuing into the 1920s, psychologists
devoted increasing attention to measuring personality, documenting its
component parts and theorizing about the form a mature personality might take.
By 1940, personality had become an entrenched category of psychological
investigation.
Several
scholars have studied the emergence of personality as a research category in
American psychology.2 Most of these investigations have been oriented primarily
around issues of methodology and marketability. For instance, in his
illuminating discussion of early American personality psychology, Kurt Danziger highlighted the links between (a) personality as
an object of research, (b) the methodological conventions of intelligence
testing, and (c) the practical need for measures of nonintellectual
traits.3 According to Danziger, the technology of
mental testing helped shape the "model of the human person" that
personality psychologists adopted. In this measurement-driven vision, the
individual was viewed as a collection of "discrete, stable, and general
qualities" or "traits," the sum total of which equaled his or her personality. The choice of categories
for personality measurement was driven largely by the demands of the
marketplace. "There appear to be no grounds intrinsic to the subject
matter for this constantly shifting empirical basis of trait psychology," Danziger argued. "It is much more
Correspondence
concerning this article should be addressed to Ian A. M. Nicholson, Department
of Psychology,
likely that these changes represent the
coming and going of research fads, but in this case [personality] the fads are
directly related to events in the social environment of the discipline."4
Although recent studies
in the history of personality psychology have underscored the pragmatic origins
of this form of research, relatively little attention has been paid to the
cultural context in which this work was situated. More specifically, few
scholars have devoted any sustained attention to the relationship between
personality's emergence as a research category in academic psychology and the
larger cultural shift in the language of American selfhood. The goal of this
article is to explore the often-neglected cultural landscape of personality
psychology. My focal point is the early career and thought of Gordon Allport
(1897-1967). Although Allport is frequently discussed in relation to his work
in the field of social psychology, his early career was oriented largely around
personality. Allport was devoted to the category, and in the 1920s and 1930s he
spent most of his time campaigning on its behalf. His efforts were truly
extensive, ranging from literature reviews and theoretical articles to semipopular articles, radio appearances, and a highly
influential textbook. By 1937 Allport was widely acknowledged as personality's
leading spokesman in American psychology. In 1939 he was elected president of
the American Psychological Association (APA). With the exception of John
Watson, Allport was the youngest person to have ever held the office and the
first APA president clearly identified with the field of personality.5
Ailport's tireless promotion of personality and the remarkable
success he attained make him an instructive case study in the cultural politics
of personality psychology. As we shall see, his career dramatizes the pragmatic
and methodological themes that often feature in historical discussions of the field.
At the same time, however, Allport's experience helps clarify the various ways
in which the new field of personality was informed by transformations in the
moral economy and discursive practices of American society. Although this
relationship might initially appear to be relatively straightforward-a case of
psychologists mirroring the moral codes and categories of popular
culture-Allport's advocacy on behalf of personality reveals a dynamic of much
greater complexity. Far from being a conduit for the morally unencumbered self,
Allport used psychology to hold the line on human nature. By embracing the new
category of personality, and scientifically calculating its nature, he strove
to safeguard a vision of the self grounded more in the agrarian world of Victorian
America than in the increasingly industrialized, urbanized nation of the 1920s.
A Man of Character
In an 1891 diary entry,
Gordon Allport's mother Nellie wrote of the hopes she harbored
for one of her newborn sons' future:
Many important things
have come to my life of which the most important is the life of another
precious boy to train for God .... This event stirred
my soul more than tongue can express with the great responsibility of three
previous souls to train for him. I have no thought to train them for worldly
praise, fame, or honor. One thought surpasses all
others-to train them to be for Christ and His work. As this little one was
given me I had one wish, one desire, that he would be worthy to be called to labor for him in dark heathen lands.6
--- 54
Nellie's choice of
missionary as a vocation for her son reveals a great deal about the moral
landscape in which Gordon Allport grew up. In the 19th century mind,
missionaries were the consummate "characters." They had sacrificed
all of the comforts of western civilization in order to save
"heathen" souls. Moreover, by venturing into inhospitable climes they
demonstrated their bravery and piety, and in so doing they deflected charges of
effeminacy that were sometimes leveled against
American-based churchmen. Kind, brave, pious, and self-sacrificing, the
missionary embodied all the virtues that Nellie endeavored
to instill in her young sons.
In a strict sense,
Nellie's late Victorian missionary aspirations went unrealized. Her sons did
not devote their careers to laboring in "dark,
heathen lands." However, a more figurative reading of Gordon Allport's
career reveals several distinct points of connection between the missionary
character for whom Nellie hoped and the personality
psychologist that Allport became.
Born in Montezuma,
Indiana, in 1897, Allport was the youngest son of John Allport, a traveling
salesman turned physician, and Nellie Wise Allport, a homemaker.7 Although both
parents were spiritually minded, the Allport family subscribed to the
conventional division of labor of the day. John
Allport was the practical man of affairs, and his wife oversaw the family's
spiritual development.8 Gordon Allport assimilated
his father's reverence for hard work, but as a child he identified particularly
strongly with his mother's religious interest and refined manner. Nellie was a
devout Methodist from the famous "burned over district" of upstate
New York.9 As a student at Falley Seminary in
Most cultural
historians agree that character was a dominant part of the cultural landscape
of Victorian America. Susman noted that "the
word character became fundamental in sustaining and even in shaping the
significant forms of culture."11 Character usually referred to the
nature of the internal qualities of an individual. To have character, a
person's traits had to have substance, durability, and integrity. Traits had to
come together in an enduring, cohesive, and morally uplifting totality. The
moral dimension was particularly important. The character ideal was all about
realizing selfhood by internalizing the values of a supposedly permanent moral
order.12 As Emerson noted in an often-quoted passage, "character
is moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature."13
In the Allport family,
building character was not a theoretical ideal; it was an ongoing project, and
its development was facilitated in a variety of different ways. The family
attended church and religious summer camps regularly, and they frequently
entertained visiting missionaries and temperance activists. Nellie was a
leading figure in a number of benevolent organizations, including the Women's
Christian Temperance Union and the Mother's Club, an organization designed to
help mothers cultivate the appropriate moral tone in the home.
As a youth, Allport did not always appreciate the
unrelenting earnestness with which his mother preached the language of
character. In one of his autobiographical statements, he recalled rebelling
against the family faith. "The more I was prodded the more I
resisted," he later recalled. By the time he reached early
--- 55
adulthood, Allport had turned away from most
of the doctrines and practices of the family faith: Methodist evangelicalism.
Allport recalled that even church attendance became rare and then "only
[as] a way of appeasing my 'old-fashioned' parents."14 This break with
Methodist practice was a significant departure from family tradition, but for
Allport it did not amount to a wholesale repudiation of the values associated
with character. Indeed, the records of Allport's undergraduate life at
Allport mapped out an
exhaustive program of work for himself that literally stretched from sunrise to
sunset. Each half-hour period was dutifully planned and executed, including
slots for rest, socializing, and philanthropy.15 The Victorian themes of
balance and order were thus carefully calibrated. Allport's course of study
also resonated with the language of character. He developed a particularly
strong affinity for what was in effect the scholarly expression of his mother's
Christian outreach: social ethics. Harvard's Department of Social Ethics had
been founded by theologian Francis Peabody in 1906 in an effort to bring
together the 19th century denominational college's traditional concern for
religion and ethics with the emerging scientific ideal of pure inductive scholarship.16
By uniting moral philosophy with the scientific method, Peabody thought that
his new department could overcome a debilitating materialism and "summon
the young men who have been imbued with the principles of political economy and
of philosophy to the practical applications of those studies."17
The
themes of self-sacrifice, duty, morality, and goodness figured prominently in
the discourse of social ethics just as they did in the moral universe that
Allport had inhabited since his youth. As an undergraduate, however, Allport
became aware that the future of moral endeavor in
The Professionalization
of Benevolence
As a Harvard social ethics
student, Allport had an opportunity to view the transformation in American
social work close up. The principal hallmark of the
--- 56
"new"
social work was a commitment to science. Social workers in the past had construed
social problems such as illegitimacy and alcoholism as moral problems to be
solved by the benevolent understanding and example of an evangelical volunteer.
By 1917, social work theorists had begun a wide-ranging campaign to reconfigure
the field's language and methods. "Moral problems" were redefined as
scientific questions treatable by scientific methods. Part of the
professionalizing trend in social work involved establishing a specialized body
of knowledge that could be applied to special problems. Between 1915 and 1920,
American social workers constructed a specialized knowledge around the concept
of casework.19 It would be difficult to exaggerate the
centrality of casework in the thought of the professionally ambitious social
workers to whom Allport was exposed. As social work historian Roy Lubove noted, casework "formed the basis of a
professional identity.20 Like many professional code
words, casework was a broad and generic term. For most of its
proponents, however, the term conveyed three ideas that were central to the
practice of modern social work.
First, casework
involved detailed record keeping. By encoding the lives of their clients in
writing, social work theorists believed that they would be better able to
accurately diagnose problems and to develop practicable solutions.21 Second,
the proponents of a casework model of social work were also committed to the
principle of differential diagnosis. Sometimes stated in terms of
individual differences, differential diagnosis called attention to what
professional social workers believed was one of the principal limitations of
the older form of benevolent social work: its inattention to the nuances of
each case. For the professional social workers, human diversity was the salient
theme of industrial life, and it sustained an ongoing commitment to
individualized treatment and diagnosis. "Treat unequal things
unequally," counseled Mary Richmond, for
"social workers have the great fact of ineradicable
individual differences in human beings to face."22
The final component of
the casework orientation was its reflexive regard for science and
sentimentality. Professional social workers were convinced of the necessity and
efficacy of scientific thinking. At the same time, however, they were not
indifferent to the human element in their craft. Theorists acknowledged that
social workers traversed a domain of lived experience and that to approach this
realm with the steely detachment of the natural scientist would not be
appropriate. Social workers must avoid "cold, sterilized, depersonalized
ideas," cautioned sociologist Arthur Todd. In his book The Scientific
Spirit and Social Work, Todd presented the emerging professional ideal. The
modern social worker would "steer between" an extreme form of
scientific indifference and the "warm, saccharine, oily, oozy,
intoxicating, overpersonalized sentimentalism"
long associated with benevolent volunteerism.23
From Allport's
perspective, one aspect of this ongoing dialogue between science and
sentimentality was to assume particular importance. To achieve the necessary
balance between science and sentimentality, social workers adopted a new, more
scientific language. One of the most consequential developments centered around the concept of character as a designation for an
individual's nature. As we have seen, character had been a dominant part of the
cultural landscape of Victorian America, and it was precisely this association
with the past that made it a liability for the new social work.
"Character" smacked of rectitude
--- 57
and prudery; it conjured up images of
the benevolent volunteer preaching to the unenlightened. Professional social
workers wanted to go beyond the amateurism of this earlier age. Rather than try
and purge character of its moral connotations, social workers abandoned the
term in favor of the newly emerging category of
personality.24 Indeed, in the late teens and early
1920s, personality became the primary target of social casework. Mary Richmond
put the matter succinctly in her authoritative book, What
Is Social Case Work?
Let me... make the
broadest generalization about social case work that I can. Its theories, its
aims, its best intensive practice all seem to have been converging of late
years toward one central idea: namely, toward the development of personality [italics added]25
What made personality
so appealing to social workers such as
The footnotes of
If the revelation of
personality unites men, the stress upon mere individuality separates them, and
there are countless poets of the day who glory in their eccentric individualism
without remembering that it is only through a richly developed personality that
poetry gains any universal values.28
For a profession
struggling to navigate a course between science and sentimentality, the
ambiguity of personality was not a liability but a resource to be exploited.
The category had a scientific cachet, and it enabled social workers to forge
alliances with professional communities in psychiatry and psychology who were
interested in personality. At the same time, however, personality was not
without its ethical suggestiveness. By orienting their professional project
around personality, social workers could be both scientific and ethical.
--- 58
Personality:
A "Benevolent"
Project
Although Allport would
later switch out of social work and into psychology, he would remain committed
to the language and methods of professionalized benevolence. Indeed, his
initial foray into psychology-his 1922 doctoral dissertation-was oriented
toward psychology and social work, and it was submitted to Harvard's Department
of Philosophy and Psychology and to the Department of Social Ethics. As one
might expect, the logic of casework was readily apparent throughout the study.
Entitled "An Experimental Study of the Traits of Personality,"
Allport hoped to provide social workers with something that they had up until
this time lacked: the technological means to fulfill the casework ideal.29 In the late teens and early 1920s, the field of individual
measurement was in its infancy. As social ethicist Richard Cabot observed:
The social worker is
liable to disappointment when she tries to find textbooks on personality study.
The study of personality does not exist, either as a science or an art, written
down. It exists in lives and not in books or lectures. The study of personality
is not yet developed.30
Allport was among a
cohort of newly emerging specialists in psychology, psychiatry, and social work
who were enticed by the promise of a science of personality. "To do
effective social service," he noted some years later, "one needed a
sound conception of human personality."31 The task as Allport saw it was
to render individuality legible. Social workers could not begin to tailor their
interventions to the needs of their clients until they had a means of seeing
individuality. Like many of his colleagues in the early 1920s, Allport believed
that laboratory experiments and intelligence tests brought individuality within
a scientific register. By developing measures of what he believed to be the
component traits of personality, Allport maintained that individuality could in
fact be plotted on a "psychograph."
As we have seen, the
social workers to whom Allport looked for inspiration were obliged to walk a
delicate line between science and ethics. Excessive moralism
was one of the principal failings of the benevolent tradition. To move the
field forward, social workers needed to bring to their clients a scientific
attitude. However, scientific excess brought its own dangers, especially in a
field as deeply immersed in the complexities of the human condition as social
work. In his early papers, Allport did not explicitly mention the tensions
engendered when science and ethics were brought together. Nevertheless, science
and ethics constituted the primary axis around which his psychology of
personality revolved.
In attempting to bridge
the divide between science and ethics, Allport chose to orient his study around
the category that had proved so appealing to social workers: personality. This
was a conscious decision on Allport's part, and the scientific and ethical
implications of the category of personality did not escape him. He explained
the rationale behind his use of the term personality in his first publication.
Entitled "Personality and Character," this article is thought to have
been the first literature review in the field of personality.32 But while its title suggests linguistic and ethical
diversity-character and personality-the goal of the article was
scientific order. Allport argued that character and personality were distinct
entities. Borrowing a distinction from John Watson, Allport maintained
--- 59
that character was a moral category; it referred
to the self when viewed from an ethical perspective. Personality, on the other
hand, referred to the objective self, the fundamental adjustment patterns that
an individual had formed over the course of his or her experience.
"Psychologists who accept Watson's view," Allport wrote, "have
no right, strictly speaking, to include character study in the province of
psychology; it belongs rather to social ethics."33
Throughout the 1920s
and 1930s, Allport acted as a kind of linguistic policeman on issues of
terminology. He renewed his attack on character in a 1927 article and
again in a lengthy and influential literature review that appeared in 1930.34 The rationale was always the same: Character needed
to be expunged from the lexicon of scientific psychology because it was a
"moral" term. This critique was clearly informed by the scientism
that was spreading throughout American social science in the 1920s.35
Value-neutrality was a central tenet of this vision, and Allport drew on its
logic in suggesting that the value-laden category of character had no place in
a scientific discipline such as psychology. But while Allport may have revered
the emerging model of value-neutral science, his inspiration was ethical. Moral
propriety had been one of the salient themes of his Methodist upbringing, and
it remained so throughout his undergraduate education in social ethics. Harvard
social ethicists such as Richard Cabot and James Ford argued that rapid
industrialization and urbanization had given rise to a growing sense of ethical
malaise. There was a clearly felt need to "determine what constitutes
goodness" and to then put those ideals forward for Americans to follow.36
Although Allport attempted to draw a sharp divide between science and ethics,
his own program was oriented around the search for "goodness." In a
1923 letter to Ford, Allport remarked that he had "never essentially
wavered from my desire to correlate psychology and social ethics. It has merely
been a practical question as to how this might be accomplished." 37
Personality provided
Allport with the ideal vehicle for pursuing this correlational end. The
category appealed to Allport for the same reason that it appealed to social
workers: It had an almost unparalleled versatility and a peculiar resonance to
the modern ear. Personality captured both the sublime and basic elements of
human nature, and it had both a scientific and a humanistic cachet.
"Personality," Allport remarked in 1927, "like
--- 60
Character Revisited, Personality
Remade
Although Allport was
anxious to forge personality into a singular scientific object, as his career
unfolded in the 1920s and 1930s he frequently drew on two visions of selfhood.
As a purveyor of psychological technologies he displayed an awareness of the
kind of self that was coming to dominate the American social landscape. His
choice of personality rather than character as his site of scientific
investigation is one obvious indication of his investment in the newly emerging
self. The personality ideal also was evident in one of Allport's most famous
theoretical tenets: uniqueness. Cultural historians have identified qualities
of uniqueness, distinctiveness, and standing out from the crowd as recurring
motifs in the new language of selfhood.40 John Burnham characterized this
preoccupation with distinctiveness as a "compensatory" response.
"In the mass society of the twenties," Burnham wrote,
"depersonalization called forth compensatory attitudes from a large
proportion of the atoms of the faceless-and presumably lonely multitude."41
Allport was among the "multitude" who reacted to the era's sense of unease about the anonymity
of life among the masses. Beginning in graduate school, and continuing
throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he repeatedly emphasized the "unique"
quality of individuals. "The first clue to understanding others,"
Allport wrote in a characteristic passage, "lies in the perception of
their uniqueness."42
In his illuminating
article on the idea of the "masses" in American popular culture,
historian Steven Smith identified distinctiveness as one of the central ironies
of John Watson's behaviorism.43 Watson promised deliverance from the anonymity
of the crowd; behaviorism was a technology of
uniqueness. Yet, as Smith noted, beneath Watson's rhetoric of distinctiveness
lay a remarkably conventional social vision. Allport's psychology of
personality harbored a similar incongruity. Despite
his celebration of "uniqueness," Allport devised psychometric
procedures that implicitly endorsed a certain kind of self. This self did not
involve qualities associated with character: duty, honor,
self-sacrifice. In his Test of Ascendance-Submission, Allport implicitly
valorized those expressive, socially dominant personalities who tended to stand
out in a crowd. The logic behind the test was simple enough. "Our current
civilization," Allport wrote, "seems to place a premium upon the
aggressive person, the 'go-getter'." A technology that could distinguish
these individuals from the masses would have an obvious appeal in the newly
emerging culture of personality.44
Anxious to exploit the possibilities
that this practical, observable self offered, Allport simultaneously displayed
an ongoing commitment to the morally grounded, self-sacrificing, stable, inner
self that was fast disappearing in American culture: the "man of
character." This attachment was much more than a nostalgic yearning for
that which was lost. The stable inner self was a living reality for Allport,
and as a psychologist he drew heavily on its precepts when reflecting on the
kind of self he had become. His various autobiographical statements are perhaps
the most revealing measure of the depth of his commitment to the character
ideal. In these works, the principal theme of the personality
ideal-self-realization-was consistently downplayed. Emphasis was instead given
to themes central to the Victorian self: service, humility, duty, moral
courage, and thrift. For instance, in his autobiography, Allport commented on
his dislike of the "aura of arrogance found in presently fashionable
dogmas" and of the need for psychologists to view
--- 61
humility as a virtue worthy of
cultivation.45 Moral courage was another aspect of the character ideal central
to Allport's autobiographical narratives. He noted on several occasions that he
had "crossed swords" with powerful intellectual tendencies in order
to stay true to his convictions.46 "I've never been cowardly," he
remarked in one interview. "I'm going to follow [personality research] out
the best I can."47 Allport drew on the language
of character again when discussing his remarkable productivity. He linked his
professional success to what historian Stefan Collini
identified as the "very crown of character": duty.48 "I wouldn't
do [research]," Allport remarked, "unless
there were an overwhelming sense of duty and obligation .... It's more than
intellectual curiosity," he continued. "I just work because I have to
and my sense of duty makes me."49
Set in historical
context, Allport's autobiographical references to courage, humility, and duty
are striking. Their significance is further magnified when considered in
relation to Allport's lived experience in the 1920s and 1930s. During this
period, and indeed throughout his life, Allport lived in a manner very much in
keeping with the character ideal. There was little room for self-indulgence, scandal,
or hedonistic excess in this morally disciplined vision. For a man of
character, life revolved around morally meaningful work. Allport viewed
personality as the site of modern moral endeavor, and
as a young faculty member he pursued his research and teaching with the same
all-consuming gusto that he brought to his undergraduate studies. "I'm no
good at playing," he told an interviewer some years later." Work was
the order of the day, but not just any work-like any good man of character,
Allport envisioned his own project in relation to a larger moral order. The
specific obligations involved in his career as a psychologist were related to a
general philosophy of life that he carefully nurtured.51
The particular kind of
a life philosophy that Allport embraced provides another link between his
career as personality psychologist and the kind of self represented by
character. In Victorian America, character had a pronounced religious
suggestiveness. The man of character was usually a man of Christ. He was a
"true Christian gentleman, pure, upright with a strong sense of duty and
possessing the 'highest kinship of the soul.'"52 Although Allport experienced some of the Progressive Era
disillusionment with organized religion,53 he did not
emerge from graduate school with what literary critic Joseph Wood Krutch would later describe as a "modem
temper."54 For Allport, unlike most of the moderns described by Krutch, God was not dead. Christianity lived on, and indeed
Allport regarded the faith as a robust bulwark against the alienation and drift
so characteristic of modern life. He went "heart and soul into... the good
old Church of
Allport's ongoing personal commitment to the
ideals if not the actual category of character invested his scientific
psychology with a peculiar duality. As we have seen, aspects of his work can be
readily assimilated into the personality ideal. At the same time, however, and
in some cases in the same publications, the hallmarks of character are clearly
visible. In his Test of Ascendance-Submission, for example, Allport suggested
that the qualities typically associated with personality ascendance,
expressiveness, and being a "go-getter" -were not the only way of
--- 62
successfully adjusting to modern life. There
were other traits that one could cultivate, traits which in hindsight look very
much like the virtues that Nellie Allport had endeavored
to instill in her character-building project:
"expansion, insight, sociality, unselfishness .... [and]
social intelligence."56
Scientific ambitions
prevented Allport from acknowledging any link between these "other
traits" and the character ideal that he so assiduously cultivated.
Nevertheless, as his career developed, the human image represented by character
was to assume increasing prominence despite his unrelenting commitment to the scientificity of personality. The influence of character is
evident in Allport's work as early as 1924 in an article entitled "The
Study of Undivided Personality" 57 Like many of
his later publications, the article was informed by a logic of defense. At stake, as far as Allport was concerned, was
human nature itself. Psychology had launched a frontal assault on the human
subject. Armed with a behavioristic language and a set of psychometric
procedures, psychologists had constructed a human image that reflected the
moral uncertainties of the age. This was a self without a core; it was a
plastic behavioral shell readily susceptible to
external manipulation.
In "The Study of
Undivided Personality," and in a series of later articles, Allport endeavored to use psychology for a rather different cultural purpose. Instead of celebrating the
veneer, as many of his colleagues in personality psychology were doing, Allport
argued that there was a stable core at the heart of every person. This was the
basic message of one of Allport's better-known works from the 1920s: trait
theory. In his influential article "What Is a Trait of Personality?", Allport took issue with the environmentalism of many
of his colleagues. Instead of viewing the individual as a shell passively
mirroring the environment, Allport argued that personality consisted of a
powerful bundle of neurologically grounded qualities or "traits." A
"trait is dynamic, or at least determinative," he wrote. "The
stimulus is not the crucial determinant that expresses personality; the trait
is itself decisive."58
In putting psychology
at the service of a self of depth and substance, Allport subtly reintroduced
many of the themes of the character ideal. Like character, the self of
Allport's trait theory possessed qualities of tangibility and inner
directedness. There was something deep and enduring about traits; like
character they had a groundedness that transcended
social circumstance. For Allport, these qualities of depth and stability all
served to underscore the importance of one of Victorian America's central
truths: namely, that individual conduct was largely determined by a relatively
stable core of inner attributes. The Victorians identified this core with
character and morals. In the scientifically minded, morally fluid world of the
1920s, Allport translated this same construction into the language of
personality and traits.
Allport's commitment to the
character ideal reached its apogee in what is undoubtedly his most famous
publication from this period: Personality: A Psychological
Interpretation. 59 The book was Allport's attempt to bring a measure of
discipline to the fractious field of personality psychology. Flailed as an
instant classic, Personality is widely celebrated as the book that
launched personality studies into the psychological mainstream. Although
professional recognition of this sort was important to Allport, the ethical
ambitions that had first inspired him to enter psychology featured prominently
in the book's construction. The book can in fact be read as an exercise in
re-enchantment. By mobilizing science and
--- 63
exploiting the ambiguities of personality,
Allport attempted to breathe new life into that model of human nature that had formally
been associated with character. The nostalgic thrust of this project is
apparent throughout the book. Allport accused psychologists of "drawing
the blood and peeling the flesh from human personality leaving only ... a
skeleton framework of mind." Psychologists were more concerned with
methodological precision and scientific respectability. In the rush to
professionalize they had not done "justice to the richness and dignity of
human personality. 60
Personality was thus
conceived as a work of restoration. Allport wanted to bring "richness and
dignity" back to human nature. Not surprisingly, his vision of a rich and
dignified human nature bore a striking resemblance to the character ideal of
his youth. Nowhere is this clearer than in Allport's discussion of the
"mature personality." As was his practice in discussions of
personality, Allport began his consideration of maturity by insisting on the scientificity of his program. He suggested that there were
three "universal and indispensable" ways to "distinguish a fully
developed personality from one that is still unripe." However, when
Allport began developing his maturity criterion his universalistic ambitions
led him straight back to the moral world of character. In keeping with the
character ideal, the mature personality was an active citizen, deeply concerned
with social and religious causes. Unlike the "garrulous Bohemian,
egotistical, self-pitying, and prating of self-expression," the mature
personality was a "man of confident dignity" who could "lose
himself in work, in contemplation.. . and in loyalty to others."61 Like character, Allport's
model also reflected a reverence of the golden mean and a religiously derived
seriousness of purpose. The mature personality had a well-developed "sense
of proportion" and a "sensitive and intricate balance."62 He
could "pursue his course diligently" in the knowledge that he
"has a place in the scheme of things according to the dispensations of a
Divine Intelligence." 63
Although
the mature personality was suffused with the values of character, like most
nostalgic invocations it contained a number of modern themes.64 To begin, Allport encouraged an exploratory attitude to
one's individuality and an openness to experience. The mature personality would
live a "creative pattern of life" rather than a "static and
stupid conventionality.- 65 In another departure from character, Allport
encouraged people to monitor their conduct not strictly in relation to a higher
moral code but in relation to a set of psychologically derived norms. Termed
insight, Allport defined this property as the "relation of what a man
thinks he is to what others (especially the psychologist) think he is."66
To be high in insight was to move ever closer to the ideal of maturity. A final
point of difference concerns Allport's character-like directive to embrace a
higher moral code. Social historians have observed that 19th-century
discussions of the self "presupposed an agreed moral code." The
ideals to which one should surrender were thus not in dispute; for the
proponents of character, the issue was not "moral relativism but weakness
of will."67 For Allport, however, moral relativism was a presupposition.
While insisting on the necessity of self-sacrifice to higher ideals, Allport
left the exact content of these ideals unspecified.
Discussion
Informed by the values
of both character and personality, and by a spirit of nostalgia and innovation,
Allport's psychology of personality is a telling illustra-
--- 64
tion of the elasticity and ambiguity of
interwar American psychology. By putting science at the service of higher
ideals, Allport's psychology was clearly part of a wider movement to stem the
tide of moral relativism and religious decline in inter-war
Consolidating
personality as a research category in psychology was Allport's consuming
passion in the interwar period. However, his professional efforts in this
regard harbored a paradoxical moral intent. By
banishing existing evaluative frameworks from scientific discussions of
personality, Allport's goal was not to destroy the traditional ethical
foundations of
The personality ideal
made the individual self "the ultimate locus of salvation.""
Personal fulfillment involved an efficient mobilization of the self's own
resources; social and ethical considerations were of secondary importance.
Although Allport occasionally warned his readers about the dangers of "selfseeking and vanity," most of his scholarly time
was spent celebrating the capabilities and prowess of the individual self.70 To
"study [a person] most fully is to take him as an individual," he
wrote.71 In Allport's hands, this position implied that selfhood could, and
perhaps should, be considered in relation to its own internal properties rather
than a broader cultural or moral milieu. By 1937 Allport thus found himself
advocating a position that was largely identical to the emerging personality
ideal. In both cases, the isolated individual was the proper object of scrutiny
and the source of fulfillment.
Although Allport's
participation in the culture of personality may have been unwitting, the moral
thrust of his psychology was by no means idiosyncratic. Despite their
century-long valorization of objectivity, American psychologists have
frequently traversed the divide between scientific description and moral
prescription. Indeed, a number of historians have persuasively argued that
morality is one of the discipline's driving concerns." According to Graham
Richards, American psychology has been animated by an "enduring moral
project" for most of its history.73 Its mandate
has been to provide a "culturally authoritative foundation for
conventional morality in a society which is constitutionally pluralistic in
terms of religion and ideology." 74
Allport's 20-year
engagement with personality represents an illuminating illustration of American
psychology's moral project at work. Like many of his colleagues in the 1920s,
he was convinced that the solution to
--- 65
conduct. The appeal of this program lay in
psychology's ability to shift the basis of ethical authority from society to
human nature itself. Instead of haggling over arbitrarily defined social
creeds, psychologists could use their methods to scrutinize the "actual
nature of personality."" An objective understanding of human nature
would serve as the foundation for a new moral code. Such a code would be
ethical, as historian Nikolas Rose explained, "because it has a basis not on an external truth-be it divine
right or collective good-but one essential to the person over whom it is
exercised.""
Although
representative of psychology's "enduring moral project," Allport's early
engagement with personality provides an important historical insight of its
own. Historians of personality psychology have frequently portrayed the field
in modernist terms. The field is thought to have grown as a result of the
confluence of bureaucratic need and methodological convention; Victorian
notions of selfhood were largely absent from personality psychology. According
to Danziger, " 'personality' [psychology] ...
never had anything in common with traditional concepts of the person as a
social agent." Although there is much to recommend this position,
Allport's experience suggests that it is somewhat overdrawn. Victorian notions
of selfhood continued to inform some of the most important discussions of
personality in psychology long after the category of character had been
formally abandoned. What is particularly important to note at this juncture is
the mediating role that personality sometimes played in American moral
discourse of the 1920s and 1930s. In Allport's hands, the category served as a
conceptual link between the values of character and those of the newly emerging
industrial order.
Notes
1. See Warren Susman, " 'Personality' and the Making of
Twentieth-Century Culture," in New Directions in American Intellectual
History, eds. J. Higham & P. Conkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979),
pp. 212-226; Burton Bledstein, The Culture of
Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in
America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 129-158; see also Stanley Coben, Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for
Cultural Change in 1920s America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),
especially chap. 1, "Victorian Character," pp. 3-35.
2. Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of
Psychological Research
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990); James Parker,
"In Search of the Person: The Historical Development of American
Personality Psychology" (PhD diss., York
University, 1991).
3. Danziger, Constructing the Subject, 1990.
4. Ibid., 163.
5. Ian Nicholson,
"Moral Projects and Disciplinary Practices: Gordon Allport and the
Development of American Personality Psychology" (PhD diss.,
York University, 1996); Franz Samelson, "The APA
Between the World Wars: 1918 to 1941," in The American Psychological
Association: A Historical Perspective, eds. Rand Evans, Virginia Sexton,
and Thomas Cadwallader (Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association, 1992), pp. 119-147.
6. Nellie Wise Allport,
diary entry, 1896, quoted in Allport, The Quest, 1944, p. 14.
7. Gordon Allport,
"Gordon Allport," in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol.
6, eds. Edwin Boring & Gardner Lindzey (New York:
Appleton Century), pp. 3-25.
8. For a detailed
discussion of John and Nellie Allport, see Nicholson, "Moral Projects and
Disciplinary Practices," 1996.
9. See Whitney Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and
Intellectual
---
66
History of Enthusiastic Religion in
10. Nellie Wise Allport to Gordon Allport(?),
11. Susman,"
'Personality" and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture," 214.
12. Ibid.
13. Cited in Samuel Smiles, Character (London: John
Murray, 1875), p. 1.
14. Gordon Allport, "The Appeal of Anglican Catholicism
to an Average Man," The
Advent Papers (n.d.): 1-19. This article may be viewed
as the religious counterpart to the
"professional"
autobiography Allport published in The History of Psychology in Autobiog-
raphy. On
the first page Allport describes the book as the "story of my religious
development." It was published anonymously by the Boston-based Church of
the Advent.
15. A record of Allport'
s course of study and extracurricular activities can be found in his
undergraduate scrapbook in the Allport Papers, Harvard University Archives.
16. For an insightful history of social ethics at Harvard
see David Potts, "Social
Ethics at Harvard, 1881-1931: A Study in Academic
Activism," in Social Sciences at
Harvard, 1860-1920, ed. Paul Buck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1965),
pp. 91-128. See
also James Ford, "Social ethics, 1905-1929," in Development of
Harvard
University, 1869-1929, ed. S. Morison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), pp.
223-230.
17. Potts, "Social Ethics," 97.
18.
Social Workers in the Florence Crittenton
Homes, 1915-1945," Journal
of Social History
22 (1988): 20-43.
19. Roy Lubove, The
Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a
Career, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 20.
20. Ibid.
21. According to the prominent
social theorist Mary Richmond, casework provided the social worker with a
"clearer understanding of the numberless ways in which bad social
conditions affect the lives of individuals." Record keeping also served as
an "indispensable guide to future action in (sic) behalf of the person
recorded." See Mary Richmond, What Is Social Case Work? (New York: Russell Sage, 1922).
22. Ibid., 151, 149.
23. Arthur Todd, The
Scientific Spirit and Social Work (New York: Macmillan, 1920).
24. Susman,"
'Personality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture."
25.
26. Susman,"
'Personality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture."
27. For a good discussion of the
place of personality in Protestant theology see William King, "An
Enthusiasm for Humanity: The Social Emphasis in Religion and Its Accommodation
in Protestant Theology," in Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual
Life, ed. Michael Lacey (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), pp. 49-77.
28. Cited in ibid., 93-94.
29. Gordon Allport,
"An Experimental Study of the Traits of Personality With
Application to the Problems of Social Diagnosis" (PhD diss.,
Harvard University, 1922).
30. Cabot's remarks appear in the "Informal
Discussion" section of Mary Jarrett,
"The Psychiatric Thread Running Through All Social Case
Work," Proceedings of the
Conference of Social Work 46 (1919), 587-593, p. 593.
31. Allport, "Gordon Allport," 7.
--- 67
32. Gordon Allport, "Personality
and Character," Psychological Bulletin 18 (1921): 441-455.
33. Ibid., 443.
34. Gordon Allport, "Concepts of Trait and Personality," Psychological
Bulletin 24
(1927): 284-293; Gordon Allport and Philip Vernon, "The Field of
Personality,"
Psychological Bulletin 27 (1930): 677-730.
35. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American
Social Science (
36. James Ford, "Introduction," in Social Problems and Social
Policy, ed. James
Ford (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1923),1-7, p.
1.
37. Allport to Ford,
38. Gordon Allport, "Review of Social
Psychology," Psychological Bulletin 27 (1930): 731-733, p. 731.
39. A. A. Roback, The
Psychology of Character (New York: Harcourt, 1927), pp. 6,
7. Allport read The Psychology of
Character before it went to press. In the preface, Roback
expressed his "indebtedness to Dr. G. W. Allport of
40. Susman, "Personality and the Making of American
Culture," 220.
41. John Burnham, Paths Into American Culture: Psychology, Medicine and Morals (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1988), 77.
42. Gordon Allport, "Some Guiding
Principles in Understanding Personality," The Family (1930): 124-128,
p. 125.
43. Steven Smith, "Personalities in the Crowd: The Idea of the 'Masses'
in
American Popular Culture," Prospects 19 (1994):
225-287, p. 274.
44. J. Herman Randall, The Culture of
Personality (
1912).
45. Allport, "Gordon Allport," 23.
46. Ibid., 22.
47. Anne Roe, interview by Gordon
Allport, March 1952, Anne Roe Papers, American Philosophical Society
Library.
48. Stefan Collini, "The idea of 'character'
in Victorian political thought,"
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 35 (1985):
29-50, p. 36.
49. Anne Roe, interview by Gordon
Allport, November 1962, Anne Roe Papers, American Philosophical Society
Library.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Susman, "Personality and the Making of Twentieth-Century
Culture," 219.
53. See Ian Nicholson, "Gordon Allport and His Religion" (paper
presented at
annual meeting of the Cheiron
Society,
54. Joseph Krutch, The
Modern Temper (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927). For a
good discussion of Krutch's
work see Peter Slater, "The Negative Secularism of The Modern Temper: Joseph
Wood Krutch," American Quarterly 33, no. 2
(1981): 185-205.
55. Gordon Allport to Edwin Powers,
56. Gordon Allport, "A Test of
Ascendance-Submission," Journal of Abnormal and
Social Psychology, 23 (1928):
118-136; p. 134.
57. Gordon Allport, "The Study of
Undivided Personality," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
19(1924): 132-141.
58. Gordon Allport, "What is a trait of personality," in Personality
& Social
Encounter, ed. Gordon Allport (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960),
p. 132. This article was read
--- 68
at the 1929 International Congress of
Psychology and published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 25
(1931): 368-372.
59. Gordon Allport, Personality:
A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Henry Holt, 1937).
60. Ibid., vii.
61. Ibid., 213.
62. Ibid., 224,223.
63. Ibid., 226.
64. For an intelligent discussion of nostalgia see David Lowenthall, The Past Is
a
Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
65. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation,
218.
66. Ibid., 221.
67. Collini, "The Idea of
'Character,' "37.
68. Robert Bellah et al., Habits
of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in
American Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985).
69. Philip Cushman, "Why the Self
Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology," American
Psychologist 45 (1990): 599-611.
70. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation,
213.
71. Ibid., 566.
72. See Geoffrey Bunn, "The Lie
Detector. Wonder Woman, and
73. Graham Richards, " 'To Know
Our Fellow Men to Do Them Good': American Psychology's Enduring Moral
Project," History of the Human Sciences 8 (1995): 1-24.
74. Ibid.
75. Allport and
76. Nikolas
Rose, "Engineering the human soul: Analyzing psychological expertise,"
Science in Context 5 (1992): 351-369, p. 361.
Received
Revision
received
Accepted