This page is created in memory of Edwin M.
Lemert, my late mentor and friend, sociologist/anthropologist, and gentleman.
I hope to develop it over the coming months and years as my understanding and
appreciation of Ed's life and work grows.
We begin with an obituary of Ed written by his nephew, Charles Lemert and Michael
Winter. It is reprinted with their permission. I have made minor editorial changes
and added a hypertext link to a description of Ed's recent book.
Edwin Lemert had just begun work on an article
and completed his last book, The Trouble
With Evil: Social Control at the Edge of Morality
(Albany: The SUNY Press, 1997) at the time of his death in his eighty-fifth
year, on November 10, 1996. Few persons of such longevity continue to work so
steadily until the last minute. Although Edwin had many interests in life, not
the least of which was his large and dispersed family, he was devoted to sociology,
which he pursued with a broad intellectual compass. This devotion kept him at
work daily in his office at the University of California, Davis long after formal
retirement.
Edwin Lemert is widely regarded as a pioneer in the labelling theory of social
deviance, which he preferred to define as societal reaction theory. He was a
maverick in many things, beginning with this important theory he first developed
in his classic 1951 work, [and mistitled book, added by P.J.] Social Pathology: a Systematic
Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior. But
while some in the labelling tradition followed an exclusively social psychological
path, Lemert insisted on a robust attention to the wider social forces involved
in the individuation of socially-imposed identities.
His distinctive gifts of thought and writing were formed early in life. Before
receiving the B.A. in Sociology in 1934 from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio,
Lemert had studied with William F. Cottrell, whose thinking induced a lasting
impression of the importance of the historical and the structural in sociological
reasoning. In those same years, Lemert studied with Miami's Professor of English,
Walter Havighurst, from whom he learned the craft of elegantly worded but honest
expression. He completed his Ph.D. in a combined department of Sociology &
Anthropology, at the Ohio State University in 1939.
Before coming to teach at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1943,
he taught briefly at Kent State University and Western Michigan University.
Recruited to UCLA by his Kent State colleague and friend Leonard Broom, Lemert
joined a small and growing Department of Sociology and Anthropology there in
1943. At UCLA he was encouraged by a distinguished group of colleagues, including
Ralph Beals, Robert F. Heizer, and William Lessa in anthropology; and Ralph
Turner, Donald Cressey, Broom, and Philip Selznick in sociology. At UCLA he
was also associated with an unusually promising group of graduate students,
which included Sheldon Messinger, Scott Grier, John Kitsuse, Aaron V. Cicourel,
and others.
His reputation growing, Lemert was invited by Dean Herbert F. Young to become
the founding chair of the sociology department of UC Davis, then just emerging
as a general campus of the University of California. He and his family moved
to Davis in 1953, and he began an association with the campus that lasted over
forty years. During that period, he not only produced two editions of the central
work of his later period, Human
Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control, and
a great many influential articles, but was also instrumental in recruiting a
number of important scholars and launching the graduate program in sociology.
His voluminous writings were put in the finest literary style, yet with constant
and scrupulous attention to the empirical evidence, most of which he gathered
himself. Those who worked with him over the years regard his gift for the personal
interview, especially with resistant subjects, as masterful. (For one of many
examples, see the material appended to "Alcohol and the Northwest Coast Indians",
published in 1954). He was equally at home with native people in the Northwest
or the Pacific Islands as with incarcerated juveniles or check forgers in Los
Angeles. His gift of respectful comfort with persons different from himself
drew on his irrepressible curiosity about the conditions and styles of human
behavior.
The topics to which Lemert made definitive and still cited contributions range
over a stunningly wide area, including the jury process, stuttering, alcoholics
and alcoholism, check forgery, juvenile justice, prostitution, drug abuse, and
of course the general theory of crime and social control for which he is so
justly famous. Lemert was President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems
(1972) and of the Pacific Sociological Society (now Pacific Sociological Association)
(1973) and served as member or consultant to numerous agencies, including Presidential
Commissions on juvenile justice, violence, and alcoholism. For a number of years
he served on the Editorial Board of the Quarterly
Journal of Studies on Alcohol. In 1974 he received
the E.H. Sutherland Award for lifetime achievement from the American Society
of Criminology, and in 1995 he received the life achievement award from the
American Criminal Justice Research Association. (In 1996 he received the Paul
Tappan Award from the Western Society of Criminology--P.J.)
Ed is missed by his six children--James, Blaine, Sean Elizabeth, Deborah, Dierdre,
and Teri--and by his many grandchildren, nephews, and nieces, some of whom were
just beginning to realize what his many friends in the intellectual professions
had long known: this was a modest, hardworking, and brilliant man, who thought
against the grain, and lived an extraordinarily full and productive life.
______________________________
Reprinted with permission from Charles Lemert (Wesleyan University; 860-663-2254)
and Michael F. Winter (University of California, Davis; 916-752-3058; mfwinter@ucdavis.edu).
If you would like to get a feeling for the
kind of person Ed was at about the time he retired, you can do so by reading
this interview with Ed conducted by John Laub.
This interview is owned and copyrighted by John Laub. Permission to download
the interview is granted for personal and educational use only. The document
may not be reprinted in any other venue, print or electronic or other, without
written permission from John Laub.
One of Ed's earliest articles, reproduced here, was "Technological
Trends," published in Sociology and Social Research 26, No. 3,
January-February 1942, pp. 265-271. Another early article was Social
Participation and Totalitarian War," American Sociological Review 89, No. 5, October
1943, pp. 531-536.
Students of the history of labeling theory are aware of the importance of stuttering to Ed's thinking and theory of secondary deviation. Some early work on speech defects, co-authored with Charles Van Riper, is "The Use of Psychodrama in the Treatment of Speech Defects," Sociometry 7, No. 2, May 1944, pp. 190-195.
More of Edwin's early works are forthcoming here.
A important aspect of Ed's intellectual legacy is his graduate students. As the above obituary indicates, he had graduate students at UCLA: Sheldon Messinger, Scott Grier, John Kitsuse, Aaron V. Cicourel, and others. At U.C. Davis the list includes James Austin, Jean Bottcher, Patrick Jackson, Karen Joe, Carl Sundholm, Jake Dear, Robert Tillman and others. He also mentored other students such as Carol Inglebrook and was a collaborator with Forrest (Woody) Dill, Floyd F. Feeney, Franco Ferracuti, and others.