W. I. Thomas

Abstract

William Isaac Thomas was born in 1863, almost a decade after Albion Small. Like Small, Thomas had a father with a religious vocation. Like Thorstein Veblen, he came from a farming background. Like G. H. Mead, he attended Oberlin College. Thomas shared with Dewey and Veblen a deep interest in the origins of modern civilisation in ‘savage’ societies. Like Robert Park, he was fascinated by the issues of immigration and race. However, like Veblen, Mead, Dewey and Park, W. I. Thomas was also a deeply individualistic thinker. He shared other men’s obsessions but he would not suffer himself to be the visible captive of any one else’s intellectual system.¹