Roads to Agreement. by Stuart Chase; Marian Tyler ChaseReview by: Lee M. BrooksSocial Forces, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Mar., 1952), pp. 351-352Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2571604 .

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LIBRARY AND WORKSHOP 351

economic and technological factors, their agrarian and urbanized conditions, their mobility processes, the homogeneity or heterogeneity of their popula- tion, and reflected in their variant hierarchies of institutions; about the intensity and type of influ- ences the regions exercise upon different levels of their population; about the amounts, directions, and patterns of intra- and inter-regional migration, the selectivity of the migrants, and the effects in the way of building up and breaking down of re- gional differences of organization and culture; about regional influence on country and city, and, conversely, the regional effects of agricultural mechanization, rural electrification, and indus- trialization and urbanization; about the growing significance of metropolitan and administrative regions; about the influence of culture centers and the possible interregional neutralization of these; about the conditioning influence of region, both in personality patterning and in producing unique col- lective behaviors (sentiments, loyalties, attitudes, folkways, thoughtways, technicways, stateways), as reflected, for example, in the adjustments interre- gional migrants must make; and, finally, about the significance of regional differences in different aspects of public opinion, in social planning, and in national action.

Some brief comparison with regionalism else- where (e.g., England and France) to highlight the details of American regionalism and some relating of American to the rapidly developing and increas- ingly pertinent world regionalism (beyond Odum's incidental reference to it) would have added to the comprehensiveness of the orientation.

Nevertheless, here is a series of treatments with signal theoretical, research, and practical engineer- ing value for demographers, political scientists, economists, businessmen, geographers, historians, sociologists, artists, linguists, and all manner and all levels of administrators and social planners, and-incidentally-a body of information which each of these categories should have about the regional "work" of all the others.

J. 0. HERTZLER

University of Nebraska

AM1ERICAN SOCIETY: A SOCIOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION.

By Robin M. Williams. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951. 545 pp. $4.50.

This reviewer is three months late, due to an editorial crisis of his own, with his review of Robin M. Williams' latest work. While the reviewer has not tried to remember the content of the reviews of

American Society: A Sociological Interpretation, he does recall the wide acceptance of the volume and numerous comments on its readability and objec- tivity. With these observations he agrees.

The orientation is the "main cultural and social structures of American society." Herein, perhaps lie the uniqueness and value of the book. To this reviewer's knowledge we have not had an introduc- tory text in sociology which has been so thoroughly oriented. The treatment is objective and analytical and in no sense is the work a treatise in sociological nationalism, although, the reviewer takes it, Wil- liams is strong in his belief and faith in democracy. This he shows clearly. However, he does not fail to deal with the shortcomings of the American system, as exemplified in his forty-five page treatment of "The American Case."

Although Williams' volume is written for intro- ductory courses,, with some supplementation it might well be used as a text in social problems or social institutions. The chapters on the family, and on the economic, political, educational, and re- ligious institutions, and on "Institutional Variation and Evasion of Normative Patterns" and "Value Orientations in American Societies" appeal to the reviewer as being unusually well done. Part of this high quality is due to the distinctiveness with which Professor Williams has treated his materials, and part of it to the nature of the content avail- able. Equally good is Chapter V on "Social Strati- fication in the United States."

As a teacher of introductory sociology, the reviewer would like more content on social group- ings and what they mean in American society, and more than ten pages devoted to geography, re- sources, and population. Perhaps in a future revi- sion Williams may see fit to come to grips more extensively with the problems of resources and population policy and the American tradition.

To Professor Williams a good product may be credited, and to the good books available in sociol- ogy another worthy volume has been added. Let us hope that some of it spills out of the classroom into social action.

WILLIAM E. COLE

University of Tennessee

ROADS TO AGREEMENT. By Stuart Chase in collabora- tion with Marian Tyler Chase. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951. 250 pp. $2.75.

In his The Proper Study of Mankind (1948) the author sketch-mapped the social sciences, showing interconnections and paths of progress in the study

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352 SOCIAL FORCES

of human relations. Roads to Agreement holds the magnifying glass over the problem of conflict and agreement which was treated but briefly in the earlier book. For thirty years his interest in group behavior has been building up, his knowledge accumulating in the quest for "universals" that underlie human relations. He offers this, as he did the other book, "as an experiment in integration,

. an exploration, not a handbook." How can conflict be reduced; what are the lanes

in the broad highway to agreement? After much study of areas of conflict he stresses five principles of agreement: (1) Participation, emphasizing "with" rather than "for" or "to," letting people into things whether it be the TVA, running a busi- ness or a college class; (2) Group energy released constructively in conference and discussion groups under a democratic-permissive type of leadership, (he is quite enthusiastic about group dynamics); (3) Clearing communication lines; a group leader is like a telephone opertor keeping the lines from jamming; "semantics is the dema- gogue's worst friend"; (4) Facts first, traveling over open communication lines can help agreement especially where emotion tends to vary inversely with knowledge (some teachers will be tempted to try phenyl-thio-carbamide; see page 8); (5) Agree- ment is much easier when people feel secure.

For the sociologist there is little that is new by way of theory or basic principle but there is for him, or for any teacher in the social sciences, a wealth of illustrative material to lighten and brighten the terminology and concepts ordinarily encountered. Chase has enviable skill in delineat- ing and relating with clarity the fundamental re- searches of recent years. He covers much ground smoothly with only an occasional bump or unex- pected turn. "Accommodation" appears to be a new word to him; he likes it and he thinks it was coined by Benjamin Selekman! (p. 138). With his discussion of the values of unanimity and consen- sus as with the Quakers or in the inner councils of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, many will agree. But doubts arise when he says with respect to unanimous verdicts by juries, "the jury deliberating as a group is very generally right," this applying more to criminal cases than to civil. (P. 59)

This book and its forerunner ought to be used in many a high school and college. Mr. Chase has done well to show how conflicts can be resolved and transmuted, to draw attention to valuable researches, projects, and experiments, and to in-

terpret some of the important things being done in social science so that the wayfaring man or Con- gressman can understand.

LEE M. BROOKS University of North Carolina

ON BEING NEGRO IN AMERICA. By J. Saunders Red- ding. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951. 156 pp. $3.00.

No GREEN PASTURES. By Roi Ottley. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951. 234 pp. $3.00.

Many sensitive and articulate Negroes have described the personality-warping and sometimes shattering experiences that come with being a colored person in a white-dominated society. W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Walter White, Horace Cayton, Richard Wright, and Ethel Waters, among others, have produced moving and fre- quently eloquent accounts of the deep dilemmas that continuously confront the individual Negro in America.

J. Saunders Redding in this brief autobiography has added significantly to this growing literature, having produced a document that can be ap- proached profitably from a number of angles. As a highly personalized autobiography, On Being Negro in America is a revealing account of one Negro's tortured and never-ending search for personal dignity and self-realization in a society that brutal- izes the racial oppressor as well as the racially oppressed.

As a literary effort it is marked by a poignant recapture of moods, impulses, and feelings that are at once fragile and intense. More than any of the above mentioned writers Mr. Redding succeeds in projecting the reader into the situations he de- scribes and into the very mind and emotions of the author. He insists that one can never really experi- ence Negro-ness without being Negro, but he has succeeded to a remarkable extent in carrying his white audience over the threshold of the black ghetto.

Psychologists will find this book valuable, not only for the personal history material but also for the frequently keen insights it provides into the impact of color prejudice on personality develop- ment. However, they will be disappointed in the limited account of the writer's earlier years. Soci- ologists will find the book highly useful as a case study. While Redding insists that he writes only of and for himself, one can hardly escape the con- clusion that his experiences, moods, frustrations, tensions-and hopes-are shared by many other

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