In the third week of October 2917, the Teapot Dome trials began, related to one of the major scandals of Harding administration. Locally, the “Ridgewood Model Home” on Walnut Terrace opened to the public, to promote the new Ridgewood subdivision in which many Wittenbergers still live today.
Nonetheless, Wittenberg College dominated much of the local news that week, thanks to the Chemistry and Psychology conferences on campus to observe the opening of the new Chemistry-Psychology building.
The Springfield Daily News (October 19, 1927) introduced the conference to the general public this way:
There are gathering today in Springfield, a notable group of scientific men who are meeting with a unique purpose; that of arriving, if possible, at a mutually satisfactory definition of the words, “Feelings and Emotions.” Discussion to a great extent will range around the effect of human feelings and emotions on the physical body, and the relation between such feelings and emotions.
The brainchild of newly-arrived Wittenberg psychology professor, Martin L. Reymert, this Symposium on Feelings and Emotions drew papers and talks from leading psychologists from major American and European universities. One famous participant was the head of Vassar’s psychology department, Dr. Margaret Floy Washburn, at the time a recent president of the American Psychological Association. According to local newspapers, and Washburn’s own account, attendance reached as high as 500, most likely making it the largest scientific or scholarly conference ever to convene here.
The well-known Dr. Washburn was the only woman on the original program and attracted considerable attention, both in the news coverage and on campus, where a reception was held in her honor at Ferncliff Hall. (Wittenberg professor of psychology Ruth Immell also ended up as part of the formal program, reading the paper of an absent colleague). Late in the week Washburn joined Edgar Fahs Smith and seven other Americans to receive honorary degrees from Wittenberg.
Sessions met both on campus and around the city: Clinical psychologists convened downtown at the Bushnell Building on Thursday; Friday morning sessions were held at the Eastern Star Temple; one public session convened at Springfield High School (now known as the Dome); and the laboratories’ dedicatory addresses were held in the new auditorium (now called Kissell) of the new Chemistry-Psychology building. The dedication of the building featured an academic procession of faculty and those attending the conference that began at Blair Hall and ended on a platform set up below Zimmerman Library.
Although psychological laboratories in American universities had first appeared toward the end of the previous century, the discipline was still in its formative period as a laboratory science. According to a 1929 study, Wittenberg’s was only the 99thcollege laboratory created in the United States. As Reymert’s opening remarks suggest, the public still had difficulty distinguishing between psychologists and various kinds of fakers and charlatans, who, said, Reymert, “must not be confused with professional psychologists who carry on their work with scientific diligence in the experimental laboratory.” Dr. James McKeen Cattell, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, gave the dedicatory address for the psychology labs, in which he said:
Chemistry is the earliest and psychology the latest of the laboratory sciences. It is of interest that we meet today to dedicate a building built for laboratories in these sciences which I understand will be given equal opportunities at Wittenberg College. Psychology as the younger child of the family has in our universities usually been given the outgrown clothes of the older sibs. Here, for almost the first time, it is treated in terms of equality.
The symposium’s papers subsequently were published by Clark University Press in Feelings and Emotions: The Wittenberg Symposium. A few years later, Professor Washburn wrote fondly of the event:
The Wittenburg Conference on Feelings and Emotions, October 19-23, 1927, was a remarkable affair. The readers of this article all probably remember how the wonderful energy and efficiency of Dr. Martin Reymert, with the enlightened support of the college administration, made the opening of a psychological and chemical laboratory at a comparatively small Ohio college a truly international event.
Edgar F. Smith, retired Provost and Professor Emeritius of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, died in 1928, one year after helping to dedicate Wittenberg’s Chemistry-Psychology building.
In 1929, Wittenberg’s departmental of psychology formed a chapter of Psi Chi, one of the twelve founding chapters of that national honor society in psychology.
Martin L. Reymert left Wittenberg in 1930 and eventually became Director of the Mooseheart Laboratory for Child Research, where he organized a Second International Symposium on Feelings and Emotions in 1948.
Ruth Immell continued to teach psychology at Wittenberg until 1947.
Margaret Washburn’s retired from Vassar, and she died in 1937.
Sources: Springfield Daily News, October 19-22, 1927; Martin L. Reymert, ed., Feelings and Emotions: The Wittenberg Symposium (1928); http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Washburn/murchison.htm, Murchison, Carl. (Ed.) (1930) History of Psychology in Autobiography Vol. 2, pp. 333-358; http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Garvey/, “List of American Psychology Laboratories,” by C. R. Garvey, first published in Psychological Bulletin, (1929): 26: 652-660; William Kinnison, Wittenberg: A Concise History.
About The Project
With Wittenberg now celebrating its 175th year, and the University unable to hold regular in-person classes as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor of History Thomas T. Taylor has started circulating several pieces on Wittenberg's history. Some originated in earlier series, either This Month in Wittenberg History or Happy Birthday Wittenberg. Others have their origin in the Wittenberg History Project or in some other, miscellaneous project. Sincerest thanks to Professor Taylor for connecting alumni, faculty, staff, and students through a historic lens.