The Founding of Laboratories

Several laboratories were founded in the United States and Canada during the last few decades of the 19th century, including the Harvard laboratory in the late 1870s under James and the Johns Hopkins laboratory by Hall in 1883. The founding of psychological laboratories in North America was only a few years behind similar events in Europe. In 1891 Frank Angell established the laboratory at Cornell, and in 1892 Ladd and Scripture founded the Yale laboratory, and Baldwin founded one atToronto.The next year Baldwin founded one at Princeton. Most major universities had their own laboratories within the next few decades.

The busy founding of laboratories, and the translation and writing of texts by teachers who were trained abroad, made the early leaders believe that they were following the German tradition. However, a change was gradually taking place, particularly in Chicago, leading to functionalism and eventually to behaviorism. The new psychology, transplanted to the American continent, soon took on a very different flavor, more appropriate to the Ortgeist there.

The Founding and Development of the American Psychological Association

Early during the period of growth ofU.S. psychology, the discipline institutionalized itself.The American Psychological Association (APA) was founded in 1892.

Who were the midwives at the APA’s birth, and how did the association get founded? Then, as always, there were the promoters, the organizers. Certainly one of the candidates most worthy of some such title was Granville Stanley Hall, the APA’s first president, who back in 1878 had been the recipient of the first U.S. doctorate specifically in the new psychology, for work with William Janies at Harvard University. At his invitation, according to several standard historical sources, a small select group of seven prominent psychologists convened at Clark University on July 8, 1892, to help Hall found the American Psychological Association. The delegates, who appointed themselves to the APA’s governing body, the Council, were Hall, then president of Clark University; G. S. Fullerton of the University of Pennsylvania, who was another early officer of the association; William James of Harvard; the laboratory founder Janies Mark Baldwin, who at the time was at Toronto; Joseph Jastrow of the University of Wisconsin, who a short six years before had received one of the earliest U.S. doctorates specifically in psychology; G. T. Ladd ofYale, who became the APA’s second president; and James McKeen Cattell of Columbia University, who in 1888 had been appointed to the first professorship specifically in psychology anywhere in the world.

At least this was the composition of the group according to several sources; that there is some confusion about what actually happened is shown by the claim of some other sources that Janies was in Switzerland at the time, that Cattell and Jastrow both claimed that they were not present at that historic July meeting after all, and that Sanford, Burnham, Fullerton, Nichols, Bryan, and Jastrow were there. At least all reports agree that Hall and Fullerton were there. How hard it is really to pin something down in history! At any rate, whoever his colleagues were on that date, it seems that Hall founded the APA in his study at Clark University (or was it in the study of his nearby home?) on July 8,1892.

The original group elected some 20-odd additional charter members, such as Angell, Scripture, Witmer, and others whose names are no longer so familiar; before the first regular annual meeting, held December 27, 1892, five more were added, including Hugo Miinsterberg and Edward Bradford Titchener, both of whom had come to the United States earlier in the year.

In 1892 when, at Fullerton’s invitation, the first meeting was held in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, there were 31 members. Hall of course was elected president, since the idea of an APA had been his. APA membership grew dramatically—from 31 in 1892 to 375 in 1917, 25 years later. It went to over 3,000 a quarter of a century after that, in 1942, and to some 26,000 in 1967; by the late 1990s it exceeded 150,000. Membership almost multiplied by 10 every 25 years. To make a slight variation on a projection that E. G. Boring undertook in the 1950s, if the APA continued to grow at the rate it did during the first century or so of its existence, by some time in the 21st century there would be more psychologists than people in the world. It turns out that membership remained fairly stable during and since the last decade of the 20th century and has done since.

A formal constitution was adopted in 1894, when the APA met at Princeton, with William Janies as president. A total of 22 members attended this meeting, and 38 had paid their dues. The first article of the constitution specified that “the object of the association is the advancement of psychology as a science. Those are eligible for membership who are engaged in this work.” At this third annual meeting, which lasted a day and a half, the secretary-treasurer, James McKeen Cattell, reported that expenditures for the year were $63.93, leaving a balance in the APA’s treasury of S127.17. Eighteen papers were presented at that convention, among them one by Sanford on apparatus, one by Cattell on the distribution of exceptional ability, studies on pain by several writers, a report on foveal nightblindness by Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847—1930), and of course James’s presidential address.

How did people let others know what they were doing, if they did not present a paper at the APA convention? For one thing, there was much informal correspondence. But publication was also an active medium. Many published in popular cultural magazines that reached a broad audience. Some published in Mind, edited in England, and some in Wundts Philosophische Studien; occasionally such journals as the Educational Review, the Journal of Comparative Neurology, and the Philosophical Review carried articles by psychologists. A major outlet was the American Journal of Psychology, but William James and several others considered it too much a house organ for Hall and his Clark colleagues and did not hold it in high regard. Yet in several respects Hall was quite conscientious in his editing of the American Journal oj Psychology—he tried to publish exhaustive abstracts and summaries of the entire psychological literature of the world in it, just as he tried similar exhaustive summaries of the literature in education and childhood in his Pedagogical Seminary.

As indicated previously, the psychological scene during the APA’s infancy was largely imported from Germany; most of the prominent psychologists of the time had studied overseas. But the United States, too, had its own laboratories, was developing its own textbooks, and had its own journals. The mental testing movement was beginning, primarily through Cattell’s interest, but there were no clinical psychologists or psychological clinics as yet, although Hall did teach psychology to psychiatrists at Worcester State Hospital for a number of years from 1889 on. What with the presidency of Clark, his books, his journals, his research, his teaching, and his involvement in the APA, one can only wonder where Hall obtained his prodigious energy.The APA was founded by excited, deeply involved people who considered themselves scientists and pioneers, on the frontiers of the new scientific psychology.

The APA rapidly grew and prospered. Its character gradually changed. Although it owned no journals in 1892, by 1942 it owned 6, and by the late 1990s it owned more than 20.These acquisitions clearly were consistent with Article I of the constitution adopted in 1894. Less consistent with it were the growing incursions of professionalism, which led to a formal split, later somewhat precariously healed again, among the ranks of psychologists. The APA was at first a scientific organization, but by the middle of the 20th century it was clearly less so. It became both a scientific and a professional association, an amalgamation of the earlier American Psychological Association and the American Association for Applied Psychology, which separated from and then rejoined the APA late in the second quarter of the 20th century. In 1892 almost all APA members were academics; by the middle of the 20th century the academic had become a minority member.

In 1930 two regional associations, the Eastern Psychological Association and the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, were affiliated with the APA. Other regional associations had been founded earlier but did not affiliate with the APA until later; all of them flourished, at least for a time: the Western Psychological Association, the Midwestern Psychological Association, the Southwestern Psychological Association, the Southeastern Psychological Association, the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the New England Psychological Association. A national student honor society in psychology, Psi Chi, was founded in 1929; it grew to become the worlds largest psychological society; with a third of a million members and chapters at more than 900 institutions of higher education by the end of the century and some 1,100 by' 2010. By 1939 10 state associations had affiliated; by the 1960s almost all of the states (and many of Canadas provinces) had organizations affiliated with the APA, and many' were represented on the APA s Council of Representatives. Most states and provinces had certification or licensure of professional psychologists shortly after the middle of the 20th century, and at the national level the American Board of Professional Psychology conducted thorough examinations for practitioners of clinical, counseling, and industrial psychology. The American Association of State Psychology' Boards, later renamed the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards, was soon preparing a semiannual written examination that was used by' most states (and Canadian provinces) as part of the rite of passage for candidates seeking licensure or certification for the professional practice of psychology'.

Professionalization, or changing from an almost exclusively' academic to an overwhelmingly practitioner organization, was not, of course, the only difference

William James and Psychology in the U.S. 101 between the 1892 APA and the APA of the first years of the 21st century, although it might be the most visible one. The early APA annual budgets were of the order of SI 00, whereas by the late 1990s they reached $80 million, and the APA owned two new office buildings it had built near Union Station in the nations capital. For a time, it tried (unsuccessfully) to publish a popular magazine, Psychology Today. Psychology, at the national level and also at the institutional level, had become big business. In 1892 U.S. psychology was a few dozen interested people; by a century or so later it was a powerful political force, composed of more than 150,000 individuals, with local, state, national, and international influence. The APA’s Central Office was restructured into four “directorates,” one each for science, education, practice, and public interest, exhibiting in its organizational structure the major concerns facing the discipline.

As will be elaborated in Part III, since 1892 the age of the great schools of psychology—structuralism, functionalism, Gestalt psychology, behaviorism, and psychoanalysis—has come and gone, but later in the 20th century there were different schools, some new, some not so new: factor analysis and psychoanalysis, existentialism and computer modeling, humanism and biofeedback, and at least one later school, the Skinnerian, was formally enshrined as an APA division. The operationist revolution opened up areas to empirical research of which the founders of the APA could not have dreamed—the scope of problems investigated empirically by the early 21st century was vastly greater than what could be studied in 1892; it has become possible to measure motivation; meaning; minute currents, magnetic fields, or trace chemicals in neural tissue; subtle aspects of interpersonal interaction; and myriad other things that were unheard of as measurements 75, 50, 25, or even 10 years earlier. The contents of the APA convention guides in recent years show the vast diversity of what people who call themselves psychologist were doing more than a century after the APA was born. Qualitatively there were, to be sure, papers on several problems and areas similar to those their ancestors were working on, but there was also much that could not have been seen in an APA program in the 1890s—some of it scientific, much of it professional. Quantitatively there were typically at least 100 times more program items included in APA conventions by early in the 21st century than were presented at an 1890s APA meeting.

There are other ways U.S. psychology' changed from the day of the APA’s founding to the time of the present writing, some of which have already been touched on and some of which will be considered in greater detail in Part III and Part IV. One could point to the mental measurements movement, the interdisciplinary ideology', the fragmentation into specialized areas, and the mushrooming of new APA divisions (see Table 8.1 for a list). Other developments in recent times include the prodigious growth and subsequent decline in research and training grant support; movements to establish certification and to lobby' for licensure; efforts to assure that services of professional psychologists can be reimbursed by insurance agencies (following the devastating effect of “health maintenance organizations” and “managed care” programs on reimbursement for professional psychological services by insurance companies); initiatives to assure prescription privileges for properly' trained practicing psychologists; the proliferation

Tabic 8.1 The divisions of the APA as of 2020

1. Society for General Psychology
2. Society for the Teaching of Psychology
3. Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science
5. Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
6. Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psycholog)'
7. Developmental Psycholog)'
8. Society for Personality and Social Psychology
9. Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI)
10. Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts
12. Society of Clinical Psycholog)'
13. Society of Consulting Psycholog)'
14. Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology
15. Educational Psychology
16. School Psycholog)'
17. Society of Counseling Psycholog)'
18. Psychologists in Public Service
19. Society for Militär)' Psychology
20. Adult Development and Aging
21. Applied Experimental and Engineering Psycholog)'
22. Rehabilitation Psycholog)'
23. Society for Consumer Psychology
24. Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
25. Behavior Analysis
26. Society for the History of Psychology
27. Society for Community Research and Action: Division of Community’ Psycholog)'
28. Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse
29. Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy
30. Society of Psychological Hypnosis
31. State, Provincial and Territorial Psychological Association Affairs
32. Society for Humanistic Psychology
33. Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities/Autism Spectrum Disorder
34. Society for Environmental, Population and Conservation Psycholog)'
35. Society for the Psychology ofWomen
36. Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality
37. Society for Child and Family Policy and Practice
38. Society for Health Psycholog)'
39. Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology
40. Society for Clinical Neuropsycholog)'
41. American Psychology-Law Society
42. Psychologists in Independent Practice
43. Society for Couple and Family Psychology
44. Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity
45. Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race
46. Society for Media Psychology and Technolog)'
47. Society for Sport, Exercise and Performance Psychology
48. Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence: Peace Psychology Division
49. Society of Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy
50. Society of Addiction Psycholog)'
51. Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities
52. International Psychology
53. Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psycholog)'
54. Society of Pediatric Psycholog)'
55. American Society for the Advancement of Pharmacotherapy
56. Trauma Psycholog)'

Note: The first 19 divisions were established in 1946; the rest were established piecemeal thereafter. Divisions 4 (comparative) and 11 (abnormal) were absorbed by divisions 6 and 12, respectively.

William James and Psychology in the U.S. 103 of miniature theoretical models; the emphasis on quantification; the development of an expensive but amazingly intricate and effective new technology for studying brain—behavior relationships with brain scans; the publication explosion and the incredibly rapid changes in the technology for sharing information; the mushrooming of new APA divisions; and the concern with minority group and womens issues. Only six bona fide “minority” psychologists have been president of the APA: Kenneth B. Clark in 1971, Richard M. Suinn in 1999, Melba J. T. Vasquez in 2011, Antonio E. Puente in 2017, Jessica Henderson Daniel in 2018, and Rosie Davis in 2019. A total of 17 women have won this distinction so far: Mary Whiton Calkins in 1905, Margaret Floy Washburn in 1921, Anne Anastasi in 1972, Leona E. Tyler in 1973, Florence L. Denmark in 1980, Janet T. Spence in 1984, Bonnie R. Strickland in 1987, Dorothy W. Cantor in 1996, Norine G. Johnson in 2001, Diane F. Halpern in 2004, Sharon S. Brehm in 2007, Carol D. Goodheart in 2010, Melba J. T. Vasquez in 2011, Suzanne Bennett Johnson in 2012, Jessica Henderson Daniel in 2018, Rosie Davis in 2019, and Sandra Shullman in 2020. Most presidents of the APA during its more than six-score years of existence have been research scholars honored for their contributions to empirical science, but that has changed in recent years. Consistent with the change in the APA’s membership, many of the APA’s presidents during the last few decades have been identified primarily with the practice of psychology instead.

Doubtless the tireless Hall would have applauded these directions and been overjoyed at the status of the APA and of U.S. psychology at the end of the 20th century. Clearly, psychology' had arrived. The field had grown prodigiously. The great majority of psychologists were engaged in the practice of psychology, convinced that they were applying sound, scientifically based psychology, but even with much necessary information concerning validity still lacking they practiced it anyway, and the public demand for practitioners continued to exceed the supply until late in the 20th century, although by then it had become harder to place new doctorates in the professional practice of psychology into desirable positions—and traditional academic jobs too became very hard to find. At the end of the century there were thousands of practitioners, thousands of teachers, thousands of researchers, and hundreds of thousands of students. It was not clear what would happen to them in the near future or what the fates would be of graduate students who were still in the pipeline. Overproduction of doctoral psychologists, both practice oriented and research oriented, had become a major workforce problem by the end of the 20th century and continued to be problematic into the first decades of the 21st century.