Edward Alsworth Ross on Western Civilization and the Birth Rate

A declining trend in fertility had taken hold in Western Europe, North America, and Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, attracting much social scientific interest and public policy concern. Explanations advanced at the time—for example, in the writings of John S. Billings, Lujo Brentano, Arsène Dumont, Adolphe Landry, and F.W. Taussig—mostly posited multiple causes and in many respects anticipated the arguments subsequently made by the theorists of “demographic transition” in the 1940s and 1950s. A prominent figure who should be added to the names just mentioned is the American sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross (1866–1951).Ross's account of fertility decline is best captured in his article, “Western civilization and the birth‐rate,” American Journal of Sociology, volume 12, no. 5 (March 1907), pp. 607–632, which is excerpted below. Writing in a vigorous and fluid style, he gives weight to the lessening of class divisions offered by democracy, the “newly awakened wants” that crowd out children, the emancipation of women, the decay of religious authority, and the numerous elements of modern life that “enthrone reason over impulse” and hence make for enlightened foresight. In the parts of the article not reprinted, Ross discusses the then widespread worries about the implications of differential fertility—the possible dysgenic effects within nations and the prospective demographic marginalization of the West as a whole (requiring “the bristling frontiers between peoples and races” to remain in place until the economic gaps are narrowed) . In an acute and prescient comment on Ross's article, published in the same issue of AJS, the demographer Walter F. Willcox (1861–1964) remarked on the prospect of the fertility decline going too far, with individual interests diverging from the interests of society:In the decrease of the death‐rate the interests of the individual striving to prolong both his own life and the lives of those dear to him, and the interests of society striving to reduce the sum‐total of death in the community, have co‐operated effectively toward a common end. In the decrease of the birth‐rate, on the other hand, there may always be, and doubtless often is, a conflict between the apparent or real interests of the individual or family and the real interests of society, the former often indicating a balance of individual or family advantage in favor of a small family, the latter always indicating that it is for the welfare of man, as of any other form of life, to continue the species, so far as possible and as a rule through the agency of its best individuals. This conflict of interests makes it possible, if not probable, that the decrease of the birth‐rate resulting from considerations solely or mainly of individual or family welfare may be more rapid, either in the entire community or in parts of it, than the welfare of the society as a whole or of humanity justifies…. This possibility or probability raises a question of great sociological importance, whether a readjustment both ethical and economic is not needed and imminent, whereby the present and future birth‐rate of the entire community or of the classes of pre‐eminent social worth may be controlled less exclusively by the interests of the individual or the family, and more by the general interests of society, or whereby society may gradually modify the interests of the former class into closer agreement with its own.Ross was a major figure in the establishment of sociology as an academic discipline in America during the early decades of the twentieth century. Born in Illinois, he was a student of the economist Richard T. Ely at Johns Hopkins (Ph.D., 1891) and began his career teaching political economy at Indiana University. He subsequently moved to Stanford University and his research interests turned toward sociology. In 1900, in a celebrated academic‐freedom case that reverberated across the county, Stanford dismissed Ross for his well‐publicized views on economic reform and opposition to immigration of cheap Asian labor. Most of the rest of his long professional life was spent at the University of Wisconsin. His major books include Social Control (1901), Foundations of Sociology (1905), Social Psychology (1908), and Principles of Sociology (1920). Population was a long‐term interest, a topic in which his socially progressive and strongly nativist (and mildly eugenic) views melded—see his Standing Room Only (1927, Arno Press Reprint 1977). There is a biography of Ross by Julius Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism (Madison, 1972); a full bibliography of his writings is appended to the obituary article by J. O. Hertzler in American Sociological Review 16 (1951): 597–613.