This paper identifies the institutional character of pre-1920 psychology at Clark University with founding President G . Stanley Hall's active "patronage" of "outsiders," argues that the origins of this institutional character can be found in Hall's own personal character and temperament, and traces the influence of this institutional character through much of the psychology done at Clark before 1920.
To begin I quote from a 1904 report on "The Changing Attitude of American Universities Toward Psychology" by Burt G. Miner, then a young instructor at the University of Iowa. In this article, he characterized America's leading graduate departments in the science. He remarked that Harvard, for example, attracted students "who are fundamentally interested in philosophy" while those at Columbia, his alma mater, seemed to "seek primarily the scientific attitude." He wrote of Cornell as "the best university [for] the historical development of experimental work" and emphasized Princeton's concerns with the "biological interpretations" of its major professor, James Mark Baldwin. How did he characterize Clark? Quite simply, he noted that Clark is "most widely known for its pedagogical interest in the science."' This summary of Clark's psychological reputation in the very early twentieth century should surprise nobody, for we are all intimately connected with Clark University, either as faculty members or as former graduate students. In addition, we are familiar with William Koelsch's centennial history of the university and Dorothy Ross's biography of G. Stanley
We thus recognize the kernel of truth in Miner's remarks and know the factual outlines of Clark's first decades well. Indeed, Koelsch and Ross have dug deeply into the archival record and have shown convincingly that Hall set out to mislead his colleagues at Clark University in the late 1880s and early 1890s. To review these details, let me simply note that, in 1887, Jonas Clark began to implement a plan for an institution of higher education in Worcester. Soon thereafter, Clark and his trustees appointed Stanley Hall as founding president, and within a year Hall had recruited perhaps the strongest research faculty to ever grace an American university. By 1892, however, Hall's chronic secretiveness and dishonesty had alienated most of his colleagues, and by the end of the year most of them had left, primarily to go to the University of Chicago. (Characteristically, Hall displaced the cause of his difficulties on to Jonas Clark, and the depth of Hall's deception remained unclear until the work of Ross and Koelsch was published.) From the early 1890s until circa 1920, then, Clark University seemed a shell of its earlier self in all fields but one: psychology.
My purpose here is to trace the particular institutional character of the Clark University Department of Psychology during its early years and suggest that this institutional character actually shaped the scientific work of its members. I argue that this institutional character derived from and reflected the personal character, and even temperament, of one individual, G. Stanley Hall, and that much of the scientific work carried