Nels Anderson

Nels Anderson (born July 31, 1889 in Chicago , USA, † October 8, 1986 in Fredericton , New Brunswick , Canada) was an American sociologist from the Chicago School . Through his empirical study of the life of the hobos , he achieved lasting international fame.

Life

Nels was named after his Swedish father, a migrant worker. His mother Annie was the daughter of Scottish immigrants. She gave birth to a total of eleven children; including a half-brother and two children who died early. Nels junior was the second in this line. In 1889 - shortly after his birth - the family moved to Spokane . The father bought a wooded area 70 miles outside of town that he wanted to convert into a farm, but found that it had taken over himself. The family moved to various locations in Idaho and eventually returned to Chicago in 1898. She stayed there until 1901, when the father took a caretaker position in an uninhabited holiday complex near Traverse City , which also included a farm. Eventually he managed to buy his own farm. In order to continue his schooling, Nels junior spent two years with a woman friend to whom he served as a boy. After eighth grade, he returned home hoping to attend high school , which his father found unnecessary. Nels junior prevailed; however, the internal arguments reached such proportions that after a year he ran away from home. He drove to his older brother in Galesburg , Illinois , where he first met the American migrant workers, with whom he would later deal as a sociologist. The preferred mode of travel for these " hobos " was free rides in the wagons of freight trains. Nels Anderson survived as a muleteer, construction worker and stoker. During the economic crisis of 1907/08, he also worked as a peddler.

He was thrown off the train on one of his hiking trips on the Utah- Nevada border . He accepted the invitation to dinner from a man making hay in a nearby field. This man, Lamond Woods, was a Mormon, and Nels Anderson became an unofficial family member and worked as henchmen in the ranches of friendly families. It was during this time that Anderson began studying Mormonism and was baptized in 1910. Although he did not practice the faith in the sense of attending church regularly or giving up alcohol or cigarettes, Anderson always insisted that he was a Mormon. In 1942 he published Desert Saints , an important resource on the history of Utah and Mormonism to this day.

Unlike his birth father, his foster father Woods insisted that Nels Anderson should continue to school. He finally enrolled at Brigham Young Academy (now Brigham Young University ) in Provo in 1911 . He earned his living and training fees himself - mainly as a carpenter and as a teacher. His aim was actually to become a lawyer, but it was here that he came into contact with sociology for the first time .

Saint-Mihiel in September 1918

Shortly after completing his studies, Anderson volunteered for military service in World War I and from April 1918 served in a pioneer unit in the US Army . After completing basic training at Camp Funston , Kansas , he entered the theater of war in France in June 1918. He took part in the St. Mihiel offensive in September and the Meuse-Argonne offensive in October . He experienced the armistice in the town of Stenay on the banks of the Meuse . In the following three months he served as a reporter in the occupation army that held the left bank of the Rhine in Germany. Anderson recorded the time of his military service in a diary that was published in 2013.

Hobos in Chicago, 1929

In 1919-20, Anderson returned to Brigham Young Academy for his senior year. During this time there was a serious conflict with the US Senator and Mormon apostle Reed Smoot , which initially concerned Anderson's support for the idea of ​​a League of Nations , but then also about the question of whether the academy should be converted into a full university ( Smoot rejected both). After graduating, Anderson made money selling knitwear and underwear. John C. Swensen , a professor at Brigham Young Academy , had encouraged him to apply for sociology at the University of Chicago , and contrary to his expectations, Albion Woodbury Small actually accepted him. After one semester, Ernest Burgess recognized Anderson's unique life experience and organized the funds for a study on the homeless in Chicago. The result was the now classic font The Hobo. The Sociology of the Homeless Man , which earned him a Masters degree. It is considered to be one of the first sociological studies to use the participatory observation method.

Anderson spent the next few years teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle and at the New School for Social Research in New York . At the age of 40 years he was with a study on the slums of East Harlem at the New York University doctorate. During this time he had met Harry Hopkins , who under the New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt coordinated the welfare measures during the Great Depression . First he founded a center for unemployed seafarers; after Roosevelt's election as President of the United States, Anderson became responsible for relations with the unions within the Federal Emergency Relief Agency . In his spare time he continued to do research and wrote Desert Saints .

After the outbreak of the Second World War , Anderson moved to the War Shipping Administration , which was primarily supposed to train new seafarers. There he worked on posts in the Persian Gulf, Egypt, India and London. In 1946 he accepted a position in the US military government of Germany and came to Berlin in 1947. In a first project he interviewed Germans about anti-Semitism . Soon, however, he was tasked with establishing unions that were to be free from communist influence. Under his direction, two academies were set up and several research projects were carried out , including in Darmstadt . After seven years working for the Allied High Commission and the United States Department of State , he was given early retirement because he was suspicious of his sympathies for unions in the McCarthy era . Finally, from 1953 to 1962 he was head of the UNESCO Institute for Social Sciences in Cologne . From 1963 he taught - now 75 - at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and at the University of New Brunswick , where he founded the department of sociology. However, since he had passed the age limit, he was no longer given a permanent position. In 1977 - at the age of 88 - Nels Anderson finally retired. He died at the age of 97 in 1986.

Fonts (selection)

• The hobo. The Sociology of the Homeless Man . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1923.
• Urban Sociology . Knopf, New York 1928.
• Men on the move . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1940.
• Desert Saints . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1942.
• The American hobo. An autobiography . EJ Brill, Leiden 1975.
• Raffaele Rauty (Ed.): On Hobos and Homelessness (Heritage of Sociology Series) . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1999, ISBN 978-0-226-01967-3 .
• Allan Kent Powell (Ed.): Nels Anderson's World War I Diary . University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City 2013, ISBN 978-1-60781-255-5 .

literature

• Footnotes, Vols. 14-15, American Sociological Association , 1986, pp. 13.
• Roger A. Salerno: Sociology Noir. Studies at the University of Chicago in Loneliness, Marginality and Deviance, 1915-1935 . McFarland & Company, Jefferson (North Carolina) and London 2007, ISBN 978-0-7864-2990-5 , Chapter: Nels Anderson an the Hobo , pp. 119-142.

Web links

• Andersond Online Biography (University of New Brunswick )
• Literature by and about Nels Anderson in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The biographical information comes from the introduction of the book published by Allan Kent Powell: Nels Anderson's World War I Diary , Salt Lake City 2013, pp. 1–21.