Stalking the wild sociologists

IU South Bend’s Keen receives ASA award

Keen is professor and chairperson of the Department of Sociology at IU South Bend. His 1999 analysis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the directorship of Hoover suggests that the organization and its leader held a special disdain for American sociologists, and Keen uses documents obtained through the Freedom of the Information Act to illustrate his point.

Keen examines the history of the FBI’s treatment of such notables as W.E.B. Du Bois; C. Wright Mills, Hoosier Robert Lynd, who along with his wife, Helen Lynd, authored two noted sociological studies emanating from the Hoosier city of Muncie: Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937); and noted IU sociologist Edwin Sutherland, who coined the phrase “white collar crime” (his book, White Collar Crime, was published in 1949), and had become head of the newly independent Department of Sociology on the Bloomington campus in 1935.

While Robert Lynd had said that it was “the role of the social scientist to be troublesome,” the massive secret surveillance efforts Hoover launched against many of American sociology’s most prominent figures has an ironic parallel, Keen points out. During the Cold War era, sociology as a discipline was being politically suppressed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union on the grounds it was a “bourgeois pseudo-science,” Keen wrote. “In the United States, (sociology) was being regarded as a hotbed of subversives and potentially ‘pinkish’ fellow travelers.”

Keen’s book was published by Greenwood Press in 1999.