July 20, 2000, Thursday
National Desk
William Whyte, a Gang Sociologist, Dies at 86
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE William F. Whyte, a sociologist with a passion for reform who wrote ''Street Corner Society,'' the trailblazing 1943 study of Italian-American gangs in the North End of Boston, died last Sunday in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 86. Mr. Whyte was a professor emeritus of sociology at Cornell University. In all, he wrote 20 influential books. But his first, ''Street Corner Society,'' was the keystone of his career. Translated into Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Italian and Spanish, the book sold more than 270,000 copies, making it one of the best-selling sociology books in history.
''Street Corner Society'' and the unusual methods that Mr. Whyte used to research it established his reputation as an innovative sociologist. He spent more than a year living with an Italian-American family in the North End slums and hanging out with gang members, watching them gamble, fight and flirt. He also guided them to organize demonstrations to get City Hall to pump more money into the neighborhood.
Mr. Whyte championed this methodology, which he called ''participatory action research,'' asserting that he could maintain his objectivity while sometimes nudging his subject in the direction of reform. But many academics questioned his methods, calling for more passive, more objective observation.
''His practice of social science was really aimed at social reform and social change,'' said Davydd Greenwood, a professor of anthropology at Cornell. ''He never accepted the notion that social science should be a purely academic profession.''
In 1948, Mr. Whyte was hired as one of the first professors at the new Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Over the next three decades, until he took emeritus status in 1979, Mr. Whyte was one of the school's most influential faculty members, an outspoken liberal who frequently called for empowering the disenfranchised and narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor.
With his unusual methods, highly personalized writing and political tilt, Mr. Whyte had a major influence on sociologists, anthropologists, social psychologists and professors of industrial relations. He wrote a widely followed how-to text for social science researchers, called ''Learning from the Field: A Guide from Experience.''
His other books focused on areas as diverse as restaurants in Chicago, oil fields in Oklahoma, peasant villages in Peru and worker-owned cooperatives in Mondragon, a town in the Basque country of Spain. Mr. Whyte usually analyzed the connections between social organization and work performance, often collaborating with economists and political scientists.
William Foote Whyte was born on June 27, 1914, in Springfield, Mass., the only child of John Whyte, a professor of German, and Caroline Van Sickle. He grew up in the Bronx, Caldwell, N.J., and Bronxville, N.Y. He showed an early proclivity for research while still in high school in Bronxville, reporting for The Bronxville Press and writing numerous columns on the town's elementary schools.
After spending a year in Germany with his father, he enrolled in Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he majored in economics, graduating in 1936.
Later that year he became a junior fellow at Harvard University, enabling him to take any course he wanted there. In his autobiography, ''Participant Observer,'' he expressed ambivalence about Harvard's academic ambience.
''The emphasis on science and scholarship did not offend me, but I was struck by the absence of any reference to an obligation to make our learning useful to society,'' he wrote. ''I said nothing, but I continued to wrestle over a way to reconcile my research interests with my social welfare concerns.''
In February 1937, while at Harvard, Mr. Whyte began research on the book that would make his name, renting a third-story room in the North End, then one of the city's worst slums. He stayed with the Orlandi family, who ran the Capri Restaurant, and he grew friendly with one gang member who became his entree into gang society. By going to pool halls and gambling clubs, Mr. Whyte learned about the skills needed to become a gang leader.
He persuaded Harvard to give a $100 a grant to a high school dropout and gang member, Angelo (Ralph) Orlandella, who was his research assistant.
In his autobiography, Mr. Whyte tells of taking a North End girl to a church dance one evening and then accompanying her home, a move that in neighborhood tradition meant he intended to marry her. He vowed never to do that again.
In May 1938 he married a longtime acquaintance, Kathleen King, and they soon moved into a renovated apartment in the North End, where he completed research for ''Street Corner Society.'' His wife, a commercial artist, edited several of his books and was co-author of his book on worker cooperatives in Spain.
''Street Corner Society'' served as Mr. Whyte's thesis at the University of Chicago, where he obtained a doctorate in sociology. The book, first published by the University of Chicago Press, was little noticed at first, but sales of the second edition, published in 1950, took off, partly because it contained many frank details previously left out.
In 1942, Mr. Whyte began teaching sociology at the University of Oklahoma, and the next year Harvard offered him a position teaching Army veterans and doing further research on Italian-American community life. But that job never materialized because he contracted polio in 1943.
He, his wife and two young children spent a year at the Warm Springs Foundation in Georgia, where he learned to walk with a cane. He spent many years in leg braces and later did his field work with the aid of crutches or a cane.
From 1944 to 1948 he taught at the University of Chicago, and then moved to Ithaca, N.Y., to spend the rest of his teaching career at Cornell.
Besides his wife, Mr. Whyte is survived by two daughters, Joyce Wiza of Manchester, N.H., and Lucy Whyte Ferguson of Taos, N.M.; two sons, Martin King Whyte of Silver Spring, Md., and John Whyte of Philadelphia; 12 grandchildren; and 8 great-grandchildren.
Organizations mentioned in this article:Related Terms:
Deaths (Obituaries); Biographical Information