The Early History (and Prehistory?) of the Midwestern Psychological Association
By Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr.
Fasken Professor of Distinguished Teaching
Texas A&M University
The Midwestern Psychological Association (MPA) is the oldest of the regional psychology organizations in America. But that statement isn't accurate if we date the MPA's origins in the way that the association does. Confused? In 2003, the MPA officially celebrated its 75th meeting, marking its first meeting as the one held at Northwestern University in 1926. If that is truly the origin of MPA, then the oldest regional organization in psychology is the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology that began in 1904. But there is another way to date the beginnings of the MPA.
In 1901 the American Psychological Association held its 10th annual meeting in Chicago, marking the first time the association had met outside of the East Coast. Some members from the Midwest had complained that it was difficult for them to attend the APA meetings and asked for the right to establish regional psychology organizations. Article XII was added to the APA By-laws in 1901 and read as follows: "Local Sections. Members and associates of the Association [APA] living in any center may, with the authorization of the Council of Directors, organize themselves into a local section for the holding of meetings." The first section to be established was the Western Branch of the APA, founded in Chicago on April 19, 1902. James Rowland Angell, of the University of Chicago, chaired the organizing committee. The committee was charged with holding a meeting later in the year but there is no published record of such a meeting. The first published account of a meeting of this group did not occur until an entry in the Psychological Bulletin in 1904 that described the "semiannual meeting of the Northwestern Branch of the American Psychological Association." These meetings were held at least until 1908 as indicated by another entry in the Psychological Bulletin during that year: "The autumn meeting of the North Central Psychological Association was held in Chicago on November 28. About seventy-five persons attended the sessions which were held in the new Psychological Laboratory of the University of Chicago." Note that there were several different names for this organization - Western Branch of APA, Northwestern Branch of APA, North Central Psychological Association - all in the span of only a half-dozen years. There are no published or unpublished accounts of these meetings that have been found after 1908, so the assumption is that the meetings ceased. In fact, in the published account of the 1926 meeting - the one that MPA recognizes as its start - the author wrote that "After a lapse of twenty years or more a group of mid-western experimental psychologists were invited to an informal conference at Northwestern University." Whether official MPA acknowledges the early 20th-century meetings, it is clear that those who started meeting in 1926 recognized a tie to the earlier group.
The 1926 meeting was held on May 7 and 8 on the campus of Northwestern University and hosted by Adam R. Gilliland, a professor there. Some of the speakers among the 19 presentations at that meeting included Joseph Jastrow, Coleman Griffith, Clark Hull, Max Meyer, Harvey Carr, and Walter Dill Scott. Attendance at the meeting is not reported, but the evening banquet drew about 70 guests. The group referred to itself as the Mid-Western Experimentalists. The 1927 meeting was held in Chicago and attended by approximately 200 persons. It was at that meeting that a committee was appointed to consider establishing a permanent organization. The formal association under its new name - the Midwestern Psychological Association - held its first meeting in 1928, and its first outside of Chicago, meeting at the University of Wisconsin. MPA has held an annual meeting every year since except for the absence of three meetings during World War II (1943-1945). Because of the informality of the meetings in 1926 and 1927, there were no officers, other than a secretary-treasurer who was responsible for meeting arrangements. All that changed in 1928 when Gilliland was elected the first president of MPA delivering his presidential address on personality traits. That meeting was significant in several ways, for example for hosting an apparatus display by an equipment manufacturer (Stoelting) and hosting a planning committee that eventually led to the founding of Psi Chi (the national honor society in psychology) the following year.
In the decades since its reappearance in the 1920s, MPA's history is a rich account of the substance and politics of psychology. There were so many papers by 1930 that simultaneous sessions had to be scheduled. There was the ten-year failed effort to standardize the content of introductory psychology courses. The meetings in 1938 at Madison, Wisconsin and 1939 at Lincoln, Nebraska, celebrated the 50th anniversaries of the founding of those psychology laboratories, among the first six psychology laboratories founded in the United States. In the 1940s, MPA president Harry Harlow spoke on "The formation of learning sets" and was followed the next year by B. F. Skinner's presidential address that asked the question "Are theories of learning necessary?" There were protests from applied psychologists who felt they didn't get their fair share of program time. There were controversies over the location of the meetings with a decision for a decade (1959-1969) to meet only in Chicago and St. Louis. There was a chance to put a permanent psychology exhibit in Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry but the MPA leadership decided the price tag was too steep. The 1952 meeting, scheduled for Ohio State University, was moved to Western Reserve University in Cleveland after OSU's president (in the midst of McCarthyism) announced that all campus speakers had to be approved by his office. And in 1968 there was considerable dissension within MPA over holding its 1969 meeting in Chicago after the August 1968 riots associated with the Democratic Party National Convention. The meeting remained in Chicago but at the cost of much good will on the part of many members. The following year the usually non-political MPA passed a resolution urging the United States to withdraw its troops from Vietnam. These and many more stories are part of the interesting history of MPA. Some of that you can find in the two sources listed below.
Benjamin, L. T., Jr. (1979). The Midwestern Psychological Association: A history of the organization and its antecedents, 1902-1978. American Psychologist, 34, 201-213.
Russell, W. (1993). The Midwestern Psychological Association. In J. L. Pate & M. Wertheimer (Eds.), In no small part: A history of regional organizations in American psychology (pp. 43-67). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Updated by MPA Secretary-Treasurer
June 25, 2007
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