1 Memorial University’s first sociologist, Donald Willmott, was cross-appointed to the provincial government’s Department of Public Welfare and the university. In addition to introducing undergraduates to the discipline of sociology he was expected to work as a part-time researcher and adviser for Public Welfare. His main dilemma as a bureaucratic intellectual was choosing between the role of a fact-finder, who tended to substantiate Welfare officials’ perceptions of reality, and the role of a policy adviser, who defined the job in a more ambitious manner and took the initiative of offering uninvited remedies along with “the facts.” The first option was consistent with a satisfying university career. The second option could potentially lead to a more insecure career because the role of a policy adviser at Public Welfare was not institutionalized in a manner that encouraged serious thinking about policy. The experiences of Donald Willmott and his wife Elizabeth tell us about the nature of faculty appointments that blur the distinction between discipline research and policy research; about the way liberal Americans reacted to Newfoundland society in the 1950s; and about academic mores at Memorial University, especially the lingering influence of religion at a secular university. Before discussing Donald Willmott’s years in Newfoundland, it is essential to review his family’s involvement in the social gospel movement, his childhood in China, and his American education in sociology. These experiences shaped his outlook on life and his approach to sociology.

2 Born in 1925 in Renshou, Sichuan, China, Willmott arrived at Memorial University in 1956 to teach at the old Parade Street campus. One of the referees described him as an “easy-going, likeable individual who is supported at home by a very friendly and outgoing young woman.” When they arrived in St. John’s, the Willmotts had one son, Kenneth, who celebrated his second birthday in September 1956. The next year Elizabeth gave birth to their daughter Carol. The following remarks from an interview in the summer of 2013 show how engaging Donald Willmott could be — even at the age of 88 — when he talked about Chinese politics from the era of his youth, the 1930s and 1940s:

3 Without the family’s involvement in the social gospel, Donald probably would not have become a sociologist. The social gospel emphasized the obligation of Christians to combat social inequality and to some extent it secularized the faith. Although the social gospel inspired the first generation of Canadian sociologists, those who obtained academic positions between the 1890s and the early 1920s, it is unusual for the movement to have a strong influence on Canadian sociologists of Willmott’s age. Donald Willmott’s great-grandparents, J.B. (James Branston) Willmott and his wife, were prominent figures in Toronto Methodism.2 Walter Willmott, Donald’s grandfather, was also active in the Methodist Church, holding several lay offices (anon., 1941). But the most intimate link with the social gospel was through Donald’s grandmother, Margaret (Thom) Willmott. “My grandparents were rather distant from each other,” Donald says. His grandmother had what he calls “an obsession or a crush” on Rev. Salem Bland, one of the leaders of the social gospel in Canada. Donald has no precise knowledge of his grandfather’s religious beliefs but says that Walter dismissed Salem Bland as “that white-haired boy.” The shorthand label Donald Willmott used to describe his grandmother and father’s religious outlook is Christian socialism. “Dad always considered himself a socialist in Canada. The Communist Party in Canada did not appeal to him, but after 1938 in China he was an underground communist” (Willmott, 2013).

4 After serving in World War I, Donald’s father, L. (Leslie) Earl Willmott (1895– 1986), entered Columbia University Teachers College to prepare himself for going to China as an educational missionary.3 At Columbia he met his future wife, Mary Katharine Geyer (1897–1986), a graduate of Wesleyan University who was also studying to be a missionary. From 1921 to 1952 Donald’s parents were employed by the United Church of Canada as missionaries at the West China Mission in Sichuan province.4 They worked in Renshou, Chungking, and Chengdu, and spent a year in the mid-1920s in Shanghai when Sichuan had become too dangerous for foreign missionaries. His parents were associated with a number of mission schools, notably West China Union University, now part of Sichuan University, in Chengdu. Earl had initially planned to assist boys at a Chinese middle school by teaching them basic mechanical skills, including how to develop photographs, as a way of making money to help them pay their tuition. But he actually taught English, education, and Christian moral philosophy at the middle school and university levels.5 His highest administrative position was Dean of Studies and Treasurer at West China Union University. Katharine taught English language, composition, and poetry as a part-time teacher in the Foreign Languages Department of West China Union University.

5 To a contemporary observer, the life of the Willmotts in China is likely to appear as an odd mix of Western imperialism and support for Chinese nationalism, left-wing politics but a comfortable lifestyle. From 1931 until they left China in early 1952 the Willmott family lived on the university campus in Chengdu. Missionaries tended to reside in private homes surrounded by a wall. The Willmotts lived in a three-storey house with two levels of verandas on three sides. Their servants were a gateman who worked as a guard, gardener, and messenger; a cook who was head of the servants and shopped for food; a “table boy” who served the food as well as washed and ironed the clothes; a “coolie” who emptied the toilets, cleaned the house, and did odd jobs; and finally an “amah” who was responsible for child care as well as mending and sewing clothes (Willmott, 2013). Before they left Canada, Earl and Katharine actually shipped their sterling silver, English China, and other table items such as fruit napkins to China. But Katharine sometimes wore a fur-lined gown in cold weather that resembled a traditional Chinese scholar’s gown (a “changshan”) and collected Chinese artifacts (C. Willmott, 2012; E. Willmott, 2013). She was the co-translator and co-editor of Pilgrimage in Poetry to Mount Omei (Phelps and Willmott, 1982). According to Donald, his father helped save West China Union University during the period of ungovernable hyperinflation in the 1940s. As university treasurer, Earl was willing to exchange the Chinese national currency on the black market, unlike his Chinese counterpart. Not all missionaries in Chengdu shared the liberal values of the social gospel. Earl was sometimes accused of being an “un-Christianizer” because some missionaries thought his rejection of the mythological elements of the Bible undermined their work (L.E. Willmott, 1925).6

6 Donald’s Chinese name was Yun Da-le. He says that “Da” was originally written by his parents using the character for “big,” but as an adult he was embarrassed by his name Cloud Big Happiness. He kept the Chinese sound for “big” but wrote it using the character for the word “attain.”7 In 1941, at the age of 16, Donald assumed he could not really anticipate his future, but he thought his career options were most likely missionary, politician, soldier, or minister. He wrote a very mature essay, “What I want to be,” for a class at the Canadian School in Chengdu. His goal in life was to be an objective, intelligent, and useful citizen of the world. He was already sensitive to the tension between objectivity and social activism:

7 After studying as a special student at the University of Nanking when the school had moved upriver to Chengdu because of the Japanese invasion, he taught in 1943–44 at a Chinese middle school near Chengdu connected with Oberlin College in Ohio. At the time the Chinese Communists were not yet openly anti-Christian. For reasons of wartime safety, the secretariat of the YMCA/YWCA was also relocated to Chengdu. These people from the east coast brought a more urgent, radical opposition to the Japanese and the corrupt Nationalists headed by Chiang Kai-shek. At the University of Nanking, Willmott participated in a secret left-wing discussion group along with his father and mother; missionaries Dryden Phelps and J. Spencer Kennard Jr.; and several Chinese people including leaders of the YMCA and YWCA. People passing through town participated for brief periods, the most famous being the historian of science, Joseph Needham.

8 When his teaching at the middle school was finished (his salary was sometimes in sacks of flour to avoid the rapid inflation of money), he felt that he should contribute to the war effort by working as an English-Chinese translator. He wrote the Canadian attaché in Chungking, the provisional capital, asking to volunteer. The attaché urged him to join the American army because there were no Canadian troops in China, but cautioned that the Americans did not always make effective use of volunteers. Consequently, Willmott worked in 1944–45 for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the first national intelligence apparatus in the United States and predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was a clerk-typist at the OSS headquarters in Chungking doing often highly secret office work. He was given this work while waiting to be assigned to a field location. After a few weeks he was anxious to become more active in the war rather than sit typing on a stool all day. Oliver J. Caldwell (1972) recruited Donald Willmott and Albert Seeley as the first two workers in the “secret, secret service” of the OSS, which was independent of the Chinese Nationalists. Translating daily radio dispatches from Chinese agents in Japanese-held cities became Willmott’s next job. Through religious activities and singing in a choir in Chungking, Willmott built up “amazing contacts” with Chinese people (including the educator Tao Xingzhi, who introduced him to the poet Guo Moruo). An Austrian Jew, Ruth Weiss, a political radical and Donald’s French teacher in high school, introduced him to people at the Yenan Mission in Chungking, and from there he met others such as Madame Sun Yat-sen.

9 Thousands of Japanese soldiers and Allied prisoners of war were stranded in China when the hostilities of World War II ended. The Americans attempted to prevent the Japanese from surrendering to the Chinese Communists and turning over their equipment and records to them. Willmott’s mission, as he understood it, was for him and Laird Ogle to go to a distant city where Japanese soldiers would surrender to them. But the mission evolved after John Birch, Willmott’s commanding officer in the OSS, got permission to replace Willmott.8

10 Birch was shot and killed on this mission by a Chinese Communist soldier. A missionary and fluent speaker of Chinese, Birch had established an effective spy network behind Japanese lines. “John Birch died in my shoes” is the way Willmott now likes to tell this story, although he realizes this is not quite true. The American military judge who investigated the death concluded that Birch’s belligerent attitude to the Chinese Communists was partly responsible for his death (Walsh, 1975). Had Willmott gone on the mission, he would not have behaved in the same manner.9 One of the most famous ultraconservative organizations in America, the John Birch Society, was named in honour of Birch, who was considered to be one of the early martyrs of the Cold War. Needless to say, Birch and Willmott did not agree on politics.

11 In 2007 Donald Willmott recounted his work as a translator for the OSS in these words:

12 After World War II, Donald Willmott entered the United States through the quota for Chinese immigrants even though he had no Chinese ancestry.11 The children of missionaries arriving home as teenagers or young adults sometimes had trouble adjusting. However, this was not the case for Willmott. He was first transferred to the OSS headquarters in Washington, D.C., and worked there for several months before entering university. “I thought I fit right in,” Willmott (2013) says. “I immediately had friends all over Washington. I felt like an ordinary person.” A very mature 21-year-old, Willmott entered Oberlin College in 1946 and graduated four years later with a B.A. degree in sociology. Veterans entering American universities just after World War II are described by the sociologist David Riesman (1980: 47) as “careerists” who wanted to make up for lost time; they brought self-confidence and a sort of “sober realism” to the classroom. At Oberlin he met the future artist-photographer Elizabeth Herrmann. She says he was “a bit of an oddball” and that one of his charms was that he failed to recognize a lot of little American customs. She gives the example of his riding an old bicycle that no one else at Oberlin would consider using. It broke down repeatedly. Elizabeth commented:

The adult self-perception of the children of the missionaries in China is that they were more committed to internationalism and social justice and less materialistic than most Canadians (Austin, 1986: 333). This is indeed an accurate depiction of Donald, as it is of Elizabeth.

13 Donald and his younger brother William are the fourth generation of academics among the men in the Willmott family.12 (Their great-grandfather and grandfather were professors of dentistry at the University of Toronto.) Donald’s adolescent plans to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an educational missionary ended when the Chinese Communists closed foreign missions. Instead, Donald and William became social scientists. William, who became a professor of anthropology at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, wrote that both he and Donald “loved China,” but since it was not possible in the 1950s to do research there, they did the next best thing. They studied overseas Chinese societies (W. Willmott, 2012: 14). Donald specialized in studying the Chinese in Indonesia; William studied the Chinese in Cambodia.

14 In a letter to his parents in June 1948, Willmott credited them for encouraging him to study sociology.13 They had “put [him] on the right track.” He had initially planned to major in English or history. At first he found the sociology courses at Oberlin to be rather dull. But the college reorganized the department in 1947 and Willmott (1948a) told his parents that he found three new professors to be inspiring. They were Richard R. Myers, a specialist in industrial sociology and social problems; George E. Simpson, an authority on race relations; and J. Milton Yinger, trained in sociology and anthropology and another authority on race relations. Simpson has acquired a sort of mythical status among sociologists because he was the teacher at Temple University in Philadelphia who inspired the young Robert Merton to study sociology. Merton became one of the most influential American sociologists of the twentieth century. Milton Yinger was more influential in Willmott’s case. Yinger was closer in age to Donald and Elizabeth, who occasionally served as babysitters for the Yinger family. One characteristic that would have drawn Willmott to Yinger is that both had parents who were Methodist (or United Church) ministers. Oberlin was a liberal institution, the first college in the United States to regularly admit African-American students; the college admitted women as full-time students as early as the 1830s. In letters to his parents, Willmott wrote about politics and religion rather than sociology. He was dismayed by his classmates’ attitude to religion. He had hoped to use the vesper services as a forum for discussing world issues but most students were looking for soothing and calming messages. “If Jesus were in Oberlin today, he certainly would not soothe people: he would stir them up, he would denounce, he would urge action, he would antagonize people right and left” (Willmott, 1948b).14

15 In the information Willmott provided Memorial University when he was applying for a position in 1955, he emphasized his experience in research methods. He wrote that his most valuable practical experience in research methods had occurred at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he completed his M.A. degree. At the Center for Group Dynamics there he had participated in a six-person research team directed by Ronald Lippitt, a social psychologist who had studied with celebrated psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Kurt Lewin. Willmott’s M.A. thesis was a study of fraternity members who had non-conventional opinions because he could get funding for that topic. At Oberlin and Michigan, Willmott seems to have made a transition from socialism to sociology. Many sociologists of his generation made this transition. Their youthful political opinions, however, left lasting traces. In Willmott’s case, it was the somewhat contradictory insistence that a moral vision be combined with scientific sociology.

16 Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, was a great place for Willmott to continue his interest in China, although “in public there was no real discussion of China at Cornell in those years” (E. Willmott, 2013). The university’s Southeast Asia Program was also very attractive. Willmott chose to do all of the work for a Ph.D. in both sociology and Southeast Asian studies, defending his thesis in both departments. The second professor who had the most influence on Willmott was his main supervisor, the political scientist and historian George McTurnan Kahin, who was the founder of the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project and later an influential critic of American policy in Vietnam. Donald and Elizabeth spent May 1954 to August 1955 in Java, Indonesia, where he gathered information for his thesis. At the same time Elizabeth did research for a monograph titled The Role of Women in Indonesia. She was also a great asset in helping Donald interview Indonesian women. Willmott’s thesis (1958c) was supported by fellowships from the American and Canadian Social Science Research Councils and the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project.

17 Willmott asked Robert Merton for advice in writing his thesis. Merton later recommended that the thesis be published by Cornell University Press (Willmott, 1958b, 2013). The Chinese of Semarang: A Changing Minority Community in Indonesia (1960) is a comprehensive study of the assimilation of a classic middleman minority in a non-Western, multicultural setting. One can only speculate about the qualities Merton might have appreciated in the thesis. Merton wrote about ethnic relations when he was young and he frequently evaluated manuscripts for publication. He would surely have liked the fact that Willmott was investigating an important public issue — ethnic conflict — in a dispassionate, objective manner despite his sympathy for Chinese cultures. Merton appreciated sophisticated research methods such as surveys (Crothers, 1987). The Chinese of Semarang consisted of a careful accumulation of empirical data through wide-ranging sources: a survey of over 1,000 high school students; 50 interviews about the composition of households; participant observation of public events; statistics from government reports; and news stories from newspapers and magazines. The conclusion, although tentative, provided a formal theory of social change that was applicable to any country. Willmott’s concern with low-level processes of social change was a good example of middle-range theorizing that led to testable hypotheses. The theory came alive when Willmott used Talcott Parsons’s pattern variables to explain the types of values expressed in contacts between ethnic Malays and Indonesians of Chinese ancestry.15 Finally, Willmott’s thesis was relevant to theories of structural functionalism because he outlined how difficult it was for shared values to unite a pluralistic society. Indonesia was characterized by an exceptional level of cultural diversity due to the competing values of indigenous ethnic groups and the influences of both traditional and modernist China, as well as the lingering influence of the colonial power, the Netherlands. The Chinese of Semarang is Willmott’s major publication.

18 The Willmotts have no document specifically stating that Donald was blacklisted by the American government. However, several incidents suggested this to them. The Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, based in New York, was officially labelled a Communist front organization.16 Board members were automatically blacklisted unless they resigned. Donald sat on the board as a youth representative and never resigned. He felt that liberal organizations were deliberately being destroyed by labelling them as Communist fronts. On principle, he let his name remain. When he was a student at the University of Michigan he once had to report to immigration in Detroit. The immigration official asked him if he would fight for Russia or the United States when war broke out. Surprised by the question, Donald answered that it would be a nuclear war and he would not fight on either side. At Cornell he refused to co-operate with an FBI agent who wanted to interview him. Donald and Elizabeth feared that blacklisting would create problems in defending his Ph.D. thesis. Although this did not happen, crossing the Canadian-American border was a concern for a long time.

19 There was another dilemma in Willmott’s academic career: whether he should concentrate on Far Eastern studies or sociology. Again, being blacklisted complicated things. American sociologists wrote almost exclusively about the United States and cared little about Asia. When Willmott expressed concern about his future in 1957 to one of his thesis advisers, the well-known anthropologist and sinologist William G. Skinner replied that many scholars found it difficult to keep up with Far Eastern studies after they had returned home. Skinner (1957) urged Willmott to try to find support somewhere in Canada: “If you can’t risk trips to the States, however, I suppose it’s only realistic to leave the field as a serious contributor unless you are sustained, as it were, within Canada. Trained sociologists who are FE [Far Eastern] specialists are so rare and so badly needed that it seems almost criminal not to keep up both specialties. I don’t envy your dilemma.” Willmott found that the possibilities of following his China interests evaporated.17

20 In 1951 the Board of Regents at Memorial University asked the retired President of the University of Alberta, Robert Newton, to prepare a report that would serve as a guide for the development of the university. As far as sociology was concerned, Newton’s advice was to introduce the discipline as a way of providing a better education for social work majors (Newton, 1952: 46–47). The timing was consistent with the pattern at comparable universities. Carleton, Mt. Allison, Alberta, McMaster, Saskatchewan, and Western Ontario also appointed their first full-time sociologists in the 1950s (Helmes-Hayes and McLaughlin, 2009: 580). Without sufficient numbers to form a department, from 1956, when the first course was offered, to 1965 sociology was housed at Memorial in a Department of Social Studies that consisted of commerce, economics, political science, sociology and anthropology, and, briefly, psychology.

21 It might seem strange that a Canadian who earned degrees from three different American universities, including his doctorate from an Ivy League school, who married an American, whose mother was American, and who served in the American military would want to teach sociology in Canada in the 1950s. The United States was the international centre for academic sociology; the discipline barely existed in Canada. By the end of the 1950s, only the universities of Alberta, McGill, and Toronto employed more than two full-time sociologists (Helmes-Hayes and McLaughlin, 2009: 580). But in the McCarthy era research even on overseas Chinese was problematic. Elizabeth Willmott writes:

22 In September 1955 Donald and Elizabeth were returning to North America from Indonesia. Donald wrote Memorial University President Raymond Gushue from a ship docked in Suez, Egypt, to ask if he could still apply for the advertised position of assistant professor in sociology. Willmott had heard about the position from David Kirk, a McGill sociology professor who had been a fellow graduate student at Cornell University.18 Months after Willmott applied to Memorial, Gordon Rothney, one of the founders of the MUN Department of History, became interested in his application, perhaps because he was a historian of Asia or because he hoped to form an interdisciplinary research team studying Newfoundland. Rothney mentioned the application to Dean of Arts M.O. Morgan, who discovered the university had forgotten to notify Willmott that his application had been successful (Willmott, 2013). Willmott remembers Memorial, despite this inauspicious beginning, as an interesting place to teach, and thinks he was lucky to land the position. Salaries were so low that he was immediately given the position of associate professor so the administration could justify an annual salary of $5,000 rather than the normal $3,000.19

23 Willmott did not visit St. John’s before accepting the position; no one at Memorial interviewed him prior to making the offer. He had wrestled over the choice between the universities of Alberta and Memorial by going so far as itemizing their advantages and disadvantages. Memorial’s disadvantages included “stagnating” in a Canadian backwater, isolation from the progressive movement, and a greater likelihood of red-baiting. He anticipated religious interference in his sociology courses at Memorial. Its library was poor. He pictured the family attending a “probably oppressive” United Church in St. John’s rather than a Unitarian Church, which was an option in Edmonton.20 Newfoundland was further from his parents in Calgary but closer to his in-laws in Washington, D.C.

24 On the other hand, teaching at Memorial did have advantages Alberta could not match. It would be easier to concentrate on his thesis at Memorial because advanced courses in sociology could not be offered when students had no background in the discipline. Worthwhile research was a real possibility in Newfoundland, although the university put little pressure on faculty to publish. Alberta had higher expectations for research but offered little financial support. He was convinced he had a better chance of giving a course on the Far East at Memorial. Finally, word of mouth (valid in this case) was that the Avalon Peninsula was more attractive than the immediate environment of Edmonton (Willmott, 1956a).

25 The Willmotts brought to Newfoundland one of the first Volkswagens seen in the province. It attracted attention wherever they went. “We are more or less settled in our house here now,” Elizabeth wrote from 20 Hoyles Avenue to Don’s brother William and his wife:

26 A theme in Elizabeth’s recollections of their years at Memorial is that she and Donald were content to enjoy the pleasures of large cities in small doses. This was true for all of the early sociologists and their spouses who were happy in St. John’s. “Washington, D.C. museums were a big part of my growing into what I am, as were marble buildings. When traveling in Europe, for example, museums were not a first interest. Landscape and creative people were. I found these in Newfoundland” (E. Willmott, forthcoming). Elizabeth was active in the artistic community in St. John’s, where she studied with the Dutch sculptor Hans Melis, whose busts of the founders of Memorial University and Premier Joseph R. Smallwood are still displayed on the university campus.

27 On 1 October 1956, Willmott wrote William G. Skinner, giving his early impressions of Memorial University and his job:

William G. Skinner (1956) replied a few weeks later: “The community does sound fascinating if a little fin de siècle.”

28 Donald Willmott had some minor conflicts with influential Catholics at the university despite the fact that Memorial had always been a secular institution. It might help put his experiences in perspective by pointing out that an American Catholic Sociology Association and journal existed in the mid-twentieth century, although they were marginal in the eyes of mainstream sociologists. At issue were the value neutrality advocated by scientifically oriented sociologists and their unwillingness to support the official policies of the Catholic Church, especially on issues related to the family (Blasi and Donahoe, 2002). The quick resolution of disputes over the values taught in the first sociology courses points to a rather high degree of academic freedom at Memorial in the mid-1950s. To quote one of Willmott’s personal letters:

29 Willmott was able to tell the committee that the type of instruction he did in class was not preaching.22 But the committee did not learn that he had written a paper about his personal religious faith as an undergraduate at Oberlin that his professor classified as Christian humanism. Writing to his parents on 5 June 1957, Willmott mentioned a false rumour, circulating, “apparently, from the smoke-filled rooms of the Student Council and the student newspaper to the innermost corners of the girls’ toilet” that he was planning to leave Memorial because Catholic powers were interfering with his teaching:

30 In 1957 the single sociology course in the MUN calendar expanded to five, although Willmott was still the only sociologist at the university. The first courses (introductory sociology, community organization, sociological aspects of personality, collective behaviour and social control, cultural anthropology) were the subjects Willmott thought he could credibly teach. Cultural anthropology was on the list because the literature about China and Indonesia that Willmott had read was typically the work of anthropologists. Some of his teachers had taught both sociology and anthropology.

31 One night a week Willmott taught a course for Public Welfare officers. He complained about this course to Skinner. Students included his boss, the assistant deputy minister. Although Willmott did not make it explicit, he was encountering problems because his students had no background in sociology. He was trying to encourage relativistic thinking among students who had little experience interacting with people of diverse values.

32 Willmott and social workers from Toronto taught a training conference for welfare officers in the summer of 1957. According to Willmott, the Toronto “experts” confirmed the dominant view within the Department of Public Welfare, thus ignoring or minimizing the rational logic of poor people. “While I was giving sociological explanations of poverty and social problems, the University of Toronto social workers were giving Freudian, individualistic interpretations of poverty. So we were sort of at cross-purposes. It is most comforting to think that the poor themselves are responsible for their poverty” (Willmott, 2007). He hoped that at least some of the trainees got his main idea: psychology cannot explain the political and economic causes of poverty. The psychology of fishing families was influenced by concrete economic, social, geographic, transportational, and fishery-collapse factors that would have to change before psychiatrists were brought in to try out Freud.

33 Willmott was an enthusiastic public speaker both on and off campus. From an academic perspective these occasions might seem trivial; however, for a public that knew little about sociology, the speeches must have helped establish the legitimacy of sociology, especially when the speaker articulated his message in a non-dogmatic, gentle, and down-to-earth manner.23

34 Willmott was engaged in two types of research. One was “scientific” surveys done with the assistance of students. The other was participant observation in which he lived for three to six days in the homes of people in four outports and observed “their problems, lifestyles, beliefs, community relationships, and relationships with the outside world” (Willmott, 2013). He completed a half-dozen reports for the Department of Public Welfare:

35 To discuss the most ambitious survey as an example, “Community Relief Incidence in Newfoundland” was undertaken in the summers of 1958 and 1959. It was a comparison of 220 communities ranked in terms of their dependence on public relief. Low dependence meant that less than 10 per cent of the population was receiving public assistance. Willmott’s most basic conclusion was that the “relief problem is not primarily one of individual inadequacy. . . . Even the individual aspects of the problem . . . can be dealt with at the group or community level” (Willmott, 1959e: 18). On the basis of shared family names Willmott tested the idea that high intermarriage rates characterized more isolated communities. While he found that this was true, he thought it was insignificant because of “regression toward the mean.” In other words, patterns of heredity over a period of generations tended to moderate abnormalities. “In some cases, we should also expect a superior endowment to be perpetuated through family inbreeding. There may be quite a few Cleopatras in Newfoundland” (Willmott, 1959: 6). He concluded that dependent communities tended to be socially isolated and smaller, although their populations were growing faster than those of the independent communities. The general educational levels of dependent communities were lower, fewer professionally trained people resided in them, and thus they had fewer people who might become future leaders of voluntary associations. In both cases the illiteracy rates were high. The most recent statistics at the community level were for 1945. Fifty-seven per cent of those over the age of 30 who resided in dependent communities were illiterate in 1945 compared to 22 per cent in independent communities. A high level of education was likely to be associated with greater self-confidence, more knowledge of the outside world, and greater willingness to face new situations. Communities did have different traditions of seeking employment in distant locations on the basis of the opportunities offered previous generations and the knowledge and social networks these experiences provided. This survey is the kind of fact-finding research that should have been done by government officials. It is based on the methodology of the social sciences, but a collection of data it is not sociology unless it is explicitly related to theory. This is not a criticism of Willmott. He delivered what the Department of Public Welfare apparently wanted.

36 Willmott spoke about the resettlement of Newfoundland’s rural population on a couple of occasions. He argued that government resettlement irrationally facilitated a pattern of natural migration that he called “abortive migration.” People did not want to leave home. Consequently, they moved to neighbouring communities that offered no long-term solution to their economic problems. The reluctance of the poorest and least educated families to move was a phenomenon he thought was common in many parts of Canada. Willmott’s proposed solution was for modest planned government actions to guide resettlement by deliberately scattering economic opportunities throughout the province, and to help individual families by facilitating the building of low-cost housing and mortgages to buy houses and small plots of land. The practical advice Willmott offered in his various studies and surveys was not controversial, but he did ask for more rationally planned social services. The south coast settlement McCallum, population about 200 in 1957, exemplified the problems he encountered. Its population was expanding due to a high birth rate and the influx of people from nearby smaller communities.

37 The theoretical perspective Willmott developed in The Chinese of Semarang could have been tested in Newfoundland. It is sad that Willmott’s sojourn in the province was too short to do this. But it would have been the kind of professional research the Department of Public Welfare would probably not have supported. Instead, Willmott embarked on research that might have had more practical value — community leadership in St. John’s. This project was never completed although it was his own initiative, not something initiated by Public Welfare. The focus was the amount of overlap in goals and members in voluntary associations, their styles of leadership, the competition for leaders, and the relative contribution of different occupations to leadership (Willmott, n.d. 3). Ronald Lippitt, with whom Willmott had studied at Michigan, was known for research on leadership styles in small groups and applied research related to the principles of deliberate social change. Willmott’s thesis also included a brief chapter on leadership. He regretted its brevity but had delayed research on the topic because it was highly political in a multi-ethnic society. He had heard stories about a researcher collecting information on leadership who was forced to leave Indonesia after his research notes were confiscated by the police.

38 At a 1958 meeting of the St. John’s Rotary Club, Willmott talked about his travels on the island and his experiences living in the homes of people in rural communities:

39 In 2013 Willmott still fondly recalled a project involving community activism. The work could have been justified to Public Welfare by claiming that socializing with the population gave him access to their private opinions. This was a study of the people living along Blackhead Road in St. John’s.

40 In a letter to R.L. Andrews, Deputy Minister of the Department of Public Welfare, Willmott outlined some of the difficulties he had encountered doing research about high levels of public relief in outports. He had difficulty getting public co-operation in welfare-related investigations because, as he said, he could not give interviewees credible answers to their questions about who was paying for his research, what he expected to discover, and the eventual use of the results. He had amassed field notes on McCallum and Gillard’s Cove, including house-to-house survey data on family composition, occupation, origins, and age and sex distribution. Furthermore, he had collected information on a dozen other communities such as Anderson’s Cove, Wild Cove, and Milltown. Gathering information on Gillard’s Cove was a problem.

41 Willmott noted in a paper written just before he left MUN, “Possibilities for Social Research in Newfoundland — and Canada,” that although Newfoundland was “a sort of Eldorado” for social scientists, no professional sociologist had published any research about the province. Willmott proposed several projects on modernization because Newfoundland appeared to be at an earlier stage of modernization than the rest of North America: “In parts of Newfoundland one might find the ‘folk society’ which we now understand has never existed in Quebec” (Willmott, 1959b: 2).24 Unfortunately, no one attempted his two most interesting proposals. One was a study of the contacts between Newfoundlanders and the transient strangers at the American military base in St. John’s. This could have been a fascinating ethnography but it was too late to do it. The base closed in 1960. The second topic was Newfoundlanders’ gradual acquisition of a Canadian identity. The Avalon Peninsula in the 1940s had been a centre of opposition to joining Canada. When the Willmotts lived in St. John’s:

Dean of Arts and Science M.O. Morgan (1992: 38) credited Willmott for proposing the creation of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). However, Willmott has no recollection of having made the proposal. Perhaps he does not remember because ISER never progressed beyond the stage of informal conversations during his years at Memorial.

42 “We met an amazing array of interesting people,” Elizabeth has written, emphasizing the cosmopolitan dimensions of the early years of Memorial University:

Although most of the Willmotts’ friends were outsiders or non-native Newfoundlanders, Donald had friendly relations, long conversations, and frequent meetings with many Newfoundlanders. He was even invited once to Premier Smallwood’s home.

43 On 2 June 1959 President Gushue, writing to one of the candidates seeking to replace Willmott, stated that the university’s first sociologist had been “very happy here, as we have been to have him, and he would prefer to stay but is leaving for family considerations.” In reality, both Donald and Elizabeth (2013) deny that they left St. John’s for family reasons. Several factors played a role in their moving to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where Donald accepted another position that straddled the academic and policy divide at the Centre for Community Studies. Actually, Willmott had rather low expectations for the Centre but anticipated that the job would help him contribute to debates about public issues.25

44 First, and most important, Willmott (2013) was unhappy about his relationship with the Newfoundland Department of Public Welfare, which “took a lot of [his] time, and ignored and buried [his] reports to them.” Most likely his ideas were perceived as too Utopian.26 One might think that a left-wing scholar would have anticipated that his work could not have an immediate impact on the public and that he would be constrained by his bureaucratic role. But sociologists educated in the United States just after World War II tended to be optimistic about the possibilities of sociology building public institutions on a rational basis (Sica, 1992: 347). It must also be reiterated that the link with the department was imposed on Willmott by the nature of the position at Memorial University. Elizabeth (2013) suggested that his willingness to work with Welfare officials might have reflected his somewhat naive understanding of North American society. On the other hand, the position probably opened doors that would have been closed to an independent researcher. The fact that no one knew much about sociology at the Newfoundland Department of Public Welfare may not be a significant cause of Willmott’s dissatisfaction. The more decisive factor may have been his desire to shape policies because of the enduring influence of the social gospel on his thinking. He did not want to stand on the sidelines.

45 Since many sociologists have been advisers to government and business organizations, it is easy to generalize about their experiences. In Willmott’s era, most American sociologists in governmental posts did not have institutionalized roles that would allow them to determine policy. Neither did Willmott. His research topics were assigned to him. Merton and Lerner (1951: 293; see also Merton, 1957: 207–24) called such people “bureaucratic technicians” and “policy servers.” At best, they were appreciated as methodologists but not as advisers. Turner and Turner (1990: 184–88) argue that authority figures, who hold strong opinions on policy, tend to be keen to find “facts” that justify or fine-tune their policies. They are less interested, however, in criticism, speculation about unintended consequences, and innovative ideas unless there is a serious crisis in the organization. Dissatisfaction as an adviser to the government is a common experience among sociologists (Halsey, 2004: 135). To quote Irving Louis Horowitz (1964: 22) from his introduction to The New Sociology: “Sociology is not necessarily a tool of policy but functions more ably as a critic of policy. When it becomes otherwise, it turns into a hypocritical extension of special interests — an ideology.” It should consequently not be a surprise that powerful civil servants paid little attention to Willmott’s research. Perhaps if Willmott had identified consistently with the scientific vision of sociology (that is, engaged in pure research), he might not have cared so much that his ideas were ignored locally. As a scientific sociologist, his targeted readers would have been the international community of social scientists.

46 In this paper the term “bureaucratic intellectual” refers only to the paid employees of an organization. The implication of the term in the sociological literature is that these people are embedded in government or corporate offices. The bureaucrat is thus part of the establishment. While the actual work of a bureaucratic intellectual resembles that of an independent policy analyst or a paid community consultant, the research occurs in a very different organizational setting. Many years after Willmott left Memorial, local social scientists often published research that was independent policy analysis or community advocacy (Neis, 1992). Willmott did not think this was a practical option for an outsider in 1950s Newfoundland. Perhaps he would have changed his mind had he remained longer in the province. But it is unlikely that any sort of advocacy research would have resulted in research acceptable for publication in peer-reviewed prestigious journals. This would have been a concern, especially in the early years of Willmott’s career.

47 The second reason why the Willmotts left Newfoundland was their reaction to the Newfoundland loggers’ strike of 1959. Premier Smallwood prevented the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) from representing provincial loggers although the union was preferred by the majority of the workers (Ladd, 1985). Much of the Newfoundland public, frightened by the possibility of violence, supported Smallwood. The Willmotts saw Smallwood’s actions as an attack on free trade unionism. This was a turning point for the Willmotts because they perceived their politics to be at odds with many of the people they knew on campus:

While noting the impact of the loggers strike, Elizabeth put more emphasis in 2013 on the expectation that they would forever be perceived as outsiders:

She further adds:

48 In addition, Donald thought the university was “going nowhere” because the construction of the new campus on Elizabeth Avenue was progressing so slowly. It was a common impression. Even the provincial Premier feared for the future of Memorial. As well, the Willmotts had associated with Chinese students at every university they attended. Now Donald found himself in a province with few Chinese and no colleagues in sociology. Finally, Willmott was becoming increasingly interested in conducting non-utilitarian research about migration. His “pipe dream” was to conduct an ambitious study of rural-to-urban migration throughout Canada in collaboration with other social scientists.27

49 The time Donald Willmott spent at Memorial University was too brief for him to make a lasting impact on the Department of Sociology. Willmott eventually spent most of his teaching career at the Glendon campus of York University. His students at Glendon included Barbara Neis, who later became one of the MUN sociologists most committed to social activism. When Ian Whitaker, a British-trained social anthropologist and an authority on the Sami in Scandinavia, replaced an American-trained sociologist and an authority on China and Indonesia, there was probably little continuity in the content of the sociology courses at Memorial.

50 In the final lecture Willmott gave to students at Memorial University in April 1959 he emphasized the point he had made in his teenage essay predicting his future — sociology requires moral commitment and objectivity. “I gave my last lecture yesterday,” he wrote his parents, and “spent the whole time talking about the dangers of conformity, and advocating a social scientific attitude towards analyzing problems plus a moral commitment to political and social action!” (Willmott, 1959d: 1).28 Thus, as he left Newfoundland in 1959, he embraced much the same “sociological imagination” that the maverick American sociologist, C. Wright Mills, espoused that same year in his classic work of that name (Mills, 1959).