Professor Kimball Young was the grandson of Brigham Young, and son of Oscar Brigham Young and Annie Marie Roseberry Young. He was born in Provo, Utah, on October 26, 1893. He was a student at Brigham Young High School, graduating in 1911.

He earned an A.B. from Brigham Young University in 1915. He married Magdalene Anderson in 1917.

Around the time of World War I, he served as a Mormon missionary in Germany, where he learned to speak and read German, and learned more about Europe. He taught high school, history and English, in Arizona for a year.

Here was an American of the third generation of the great frontiersman, Brigham Young, born in Utah before the world wars, studying in Church schools, serving as a missionary, marrying, then teaching high school in the west. Thus far, his career was rather normal for a young, ambitious Mormon.

But then he made a decision to begin a breathtaking trek across new fields "back East." He credited William J. Snow, a BYU teacher, who suggested that he could broaden his horizons in Chicago.

Young spent five quarters at the University of Chicago immersed in sociology. There he studied with Robert E. Park and William I. Thomas, and received an A.M. degree in sociology in 1918.

After Chicago, Young took off from there to Stanford University in California to seek a Ph.D. in psychology, which he received in 1921, under Lewis Terman. He then served as a psychologist at the University of Oregon (1920-22). He was assistant professor in the University of Oregon for those two years.

From Oregon he moved across the country to New England, to work as an assistant professor at Clark University (1922-23), stamping ground of Hankins, Odum, and Frazier. He returned to the University of Oregon from 1923-26 to work as a psychologist again.

Following that he moved to the University of Wisconsin, where he served as associate professor of social psychology (1930-40).

His first marriage had not been a success, and in 1940 he married again, this time to Lillian Doster.

He was chairman of the sociology program at Queens College (1940-47) in the Northeast; at Shrivenham American University (U.S. Army installation in England, 1945); and back to the Middle States to teach at Northwestern University, beginning in 1947, where he was head of the Department of Sociology.

And in the meantime he had been author of some of the most popular textbooks used widely in all parts of the nation by thousands of students in the rapidly expanding field of American sociology.

He had been elected president of the Alpha Kappa Delta in 1928-30, and president of the American Sociological Society in 1943. He held a Guggenheim fellowship in 1951-52.

With Robert Seashore and Melville J. Herskovits, he establish an integrated sociology - psychology - anthropology freshman course in 1948 at Northwestern.

He was the author of many articles and of widely known texts in sociology, social psychology, and personality, and of Isn't One Wife Enough? -- a study of life among the early Mormons.

He was generous with his time and knowledge, and could be irascible in interpersonal relations. For example, as a young social scientist trained in psychology, he spent hours with a young colleague in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Ralph Linton.

To admirers of the writings of both Young and Linton, it is evident that they stimulated and learned from one another. Each of the two denied, however, that the other had any influence on his work.

As an individual, Kimball Young presented his fellow social scientists with a fascinating set of paradoxes. He was prejudiced against virtually all social categories, but against virtually no individual human beings.

He was infected with the racial prejudices of his father's time and place, but was a warm supporter of E. Franklin Frazier as the first black president of the American Sociological Society.

He was a catalog of petty anti-Semitic sterotypes, but he counted Louis Wirth and Melville J. Herskovits among his closest friends.

He believed it important to be well dressed, but occasionally he arrived at the chairman's office in a Hawaiian shirt and a Homburg hat.

He was a political conservative, but worked tirelessly to help the late Eduardo Mondlane prepare for a career as an anti-colonial revolutionary.

He interested himself in the personal problems of the campus janitors, and cursed at the university business manager for having the lights turned off in the campus office buildings on Sundays, when normal professors did their work.

Kimball Young served as the 35th President of the American Sociological Society (the name was later changed to Association). His Presidential Address, "Society and the State: Some Neglected Areas of Research and Theory," was delivered at the organization's annual meeting in Chicago in December 1945, and was later published in the American Sociological Review (Volume 11, Number 2, pages 137-46, April, 1946).

"My father, as you know," he said, "was a son of Brigham Young and brought up in the faith of the Mormons. Yet he was a well-read man — only had a third-grade schooling, formally — knew Shakespeare, Sam Johnson, and most of the hard-headed literary lights of English literature. He read Tom Paine, Robert Ingersoll, Darwin, Huxley, and especially Herbert Spencer. He even tackled Schopenhauer, though I fancy he found him a bit tough going.

"Politically he was a `Jacksonian' Democrat — and this in the midst of the Reed Smoot type of Republicanism. Incidentally, he `knew everybody' worth knowing in Mormondom, and Smoot was a close personal friend. You see, our family were among the ιlite of the Church, so even though he was looked upon as heterodox, he was liked and respected. This helped in my own adjustment, too.

"Now my father and an old friend of his, Doctor Richards — also a son of a prominent Mormon — would spend hours on end arguing politics, economics, religion, and philosophy.

"I used to hear them while I was at play, and though I did not understand much of what they said, I gathered a critical attitude, a questioning frame of mind, from hearing them checkmate each other in their own disputations.

"Added to this was my own reading of some of the simpler items in Ingersoll and Paine, at about the coming of puberty. But with respect to sociological interests and teaching, it was such books as Tylor's Anthropology, which I read when 13 years of age, and various histories, that set me on my way.

"In Brigham Young High School (which was the preparatory department of Brigham Young University, at Provo, Utah) I had excellent teachers, especially in civics, history, and literature.

"In college it was John C. Swenson, sociologist; Joseph Peterson, psychologist; and William Chamberlain, a philosopher; who gave me the chief shove toward sociology and social psychology.

"I devoured the first two volumes of Cooley, which were texts in a course in social psychology. I cut my sociological teeth on Small and Vincent, and we even made little community maps and the like, along the lines of those in that long-forgotten but, for its time, invaluable book.

"But I majored in history, as there was not yet a separate department of sociology at BYU.

"After a year of teaching in a high school in Arizona — English and history — I took off to Chicago, under the stimulation of William J. Snow, another teacher at Brigham Young University, who told me about W. I. Thomas and his course in `Social Origins.' I had never heard of Thomas until then, and had read nothing of his.

"The five quarters at Chicago, where my record was very sound, as a student, `fixed' me for sociology and social psychology.

"Within two quarters I had become `reader' for Thomas, and was reading like mad everything I could lay my hands on in sociology and social psychology. G. H. Mead had a great influence on me, but I took work with Small, Park, Burgess, E. S. Ames, G. B. Foster, and others.

"However, I took my doctorate in psychology under Terman at Stanford, and used my work at Chicago to fulfill my requirements for a full or double minor.

"But though I taught straight psychology for some years after taking the Ph.D., my first love was social psychology and the psychology of personality.

"With regard to the latter, I must add one more comment. At Oregon, beginning in 1920, I gave what must have been one of the first courses under the title: `Psychology of Personality.' I used Wells' Mental Adjustments as the basic text, and had the students read Freud and other dynamic psychologists."

In addition to a large number of articles in contemporary social science journals, Kimball Young's main works include Mental Differences in Certain Immigrant Groups, 1922; Source Book for Social Psychology, 1927; Social Psychology, 1930, 1944; Social Attitudes (with others), 1931; An Introductory Sociology, 1934, new editions, 1942, 1949; Source Book for Sociology, 1935; Personality and Problems of Adjustment, 1941.

Young was general editor of the "American Sociology Series" for the American Book Company, member of the board of editors of the Journal of Social Psychology, and The American Journal of Sociology.

He combined his broad interest in the social sciences, being a member of the Social Science Research Council, of the American Psychological Association, and of various local and regional organizations. While at Wisconsin he also collaborated in The Madison Community, produced with R. D. Lawrence, a bibliography on censorship and propaganda.

In his evaluation of sociology's status and trends, as of 1948, he begins by saying:

"Sociology is just now — say in the past ten years — beginning to mature.

"When I began as a student with Thomas, Park and Small, in 1916, the work was still largely oriented along philosophic lines. Thomas and Park were just beginning to stress empirical field studies, but without being able to give the graduate student much in the way of rigid training in method. I had my first course in statistics, for example, with James A. Field, an economist.

"However, under Park I did the first, or one of the first, ecological field studies in Chicago, working the area north of the river along Clark Street to Chicago Avenue. I am told that later the graduate students literally `wore out' my M.A. thesis, reading it as a `bad' example and as a warning `what not to do.'

"It was not until the early 1930s that more rigid methods began to take root. Remember how in the late 1920s, we discussed method with such sound and fury, but no one did much empirical research.

"Gradually the movement started: Chapin, Rice, Burgess, the group at North Carolina, and later Stouffer and his whole generation. Today we are beginning to look a little like a science.

"As one who has produced a tolerably successful textbook, I should say that our students are beginning to reap the benefits of this empirical trend.

"But as to theory to go along with it, that is another story. We now need a synthesis — say as of 1950 — and we have no Aristotles around, although Parsons, Merton, and Lundberg have acquitted themselves pretty well."

Concerning his own work, he said:

"If I have made any special contribution to sociology, it has been in social psychology and with reference to this one matter: I have long maintained

(a) that not all learning is cultural learning (that is, the learning in which we are interested);

(b) that basic to cultural learning, or conditioning, if you prefer this term, is social learning which is older than culture;

(c) that is to say, social learning is found not only in man but in all mammals, especially the primates;

(d) as a result of this we find many of the basic features of social order among the prehuman, higher forms, e.g., apes and monkeys, such as familial group, play group, dominance and submission, prototype of in-group vs. out-group, and others;

(e) and finally that even in human society we find social learning which is not identical to what we call `cultural' learning.

"Those who stress cultural determinism scout this and do not properly recognize the difference.

"Now, for want of a better term, I have called this `personal-social' learning or conditioning. It is not a happy term but I do think the idea is important. Few people have paid any attention to it, and most of those who do have misconstrued my meaning a bit. Burgess comes near to it in his discussion of the psychogenics of the personality."

More specifically, Young writes:

"In any case, this is my one original contribution to social psychological theory, although others also considered the matter in varying ways.

"Second to this, I believe I have done a tolerable job in bringing together cultural anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. This is seen in my sociology books, and in my Social Psychology itself.

"I think of myself as a social psychologist, concerned with both basic phases:

(a) collective behavior, e.g., crowds, fashion phenomena, public opinion, and like areas; and

(b) personality development and operation.

"To me we need to tackle really big problems, but those which can be made manageable.

"We neglect our possible contribution to international affairs.

"We have not as yet tackled industrial problems as we should.

"And even in the field of majority-minority groups we have messed around trying to rationalize rather than understand conflict and intolerance. Until other persons than members of minority groups begin to tackle these topics seriously, we won't advance very much. Most people are afraid to go at the problems honestly because they fear the Jews and Negroes won't like what they find out.

"As to our biggest need, it is still methodological, but we are making advances."

The following obituary was published for Kimball Young in the May 1973 issue of Footnotes (page 8):

"Kimball Young's career so effectively spans the development of sociology in America over a fifty-year period that his own biography provides a set of markers describing where we have been and, perhaps, suggesting where we are going.

"He was one of the first sociologists whose intellectual curiosity led him to be psychoanalyzed. This is hardly a startling idea today; half a century ago, when Kimball Young decided that personal psychoanalysis might contribute to social science insight, he took a year's leave from his academic post and left the community in order to avoid the consequences that might stem from rumors about a professor's needing mental treatment.

"In the 1970's, high school freshmen discuss the burden of parents who project their own ambitions onto their children. When Kimball Young published an article on this topic in the 1920's, it was a fresh and challenging idea.

"When, as a young radical member of the American Sociological Society, Young participated in the caucus picking W. I. Thomas for President of the Society, older members who had come to the profession via the Protestant ministry predicted that such leadership spelled doom for the discipline in the American academic world.

"At the last meeting of the American Sociological Association which he attended, Young applauded vigorously the efforts of the caucus using sociological research on military institutions - an interest he had sustained since his own studies of Ratzehoffer and Gumplowitz.

"Kimball Young died in Provo, Utah, on September 1, 1972, of congestive heart failure. He retired from Northwestern University in 1962 and not long afterward suffered the detachment of both retinas. Despite his resulting blindness, he continued to work and taught a seminar or two a year for several years at Arizona State University."

~ ~ Special thanks to
Raymond W. Mack &
Robert F. Winch
of Northwestern University