Samuel A. Stouffer - Personality

Personality

Stouffer is described by his family and those who knew him well as a gentleman of warmth, compassion, restless energy, high standards, depth, and a puckish sense of humor. His academic lectures, through which he often chain-smoked, were littered with allusions and quotations from Shakespeare, and these would often be accompanied by baseball statistics. Deeply intellectually curious and impatient for survey results, Prof. Stouffer would frequently sit by the IBM punched card sifting machine to see the raw answers to his queries. (These traits help to explain how he produced the classic Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties so quickly). In his few free hours he favored Mickey Spillane novels and listening to baseball on the radio. His correspondence reveals a clear thinking pragmatist with a deep sense of responsibility to his society and to his profession. As James Davis writes in the introduction to Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties (reprinted in 1992 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick), “Sam was a great sociologist….”