born Oct. 26, 1898, Redlands, Calif., U.S.
died May 23, 1970, Chicago, Ill.
U.S. sociologist and anthropologist.
He studied with Alfred L. Kroeber and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and later taught at the universities of Chicago and Michigan. His studies of the American class system have been widely influential. In the late 1930s he produced a five-volume study of Newburyport, Mass.; his other books include A Black Civilization (1937), The Social Life of a Modern Community (1941), and The Living and the Dead (1959).