Paul Underwood Kellogg

• Paul Underwood Kellogg
• Born: September 30, 1879
• Died: November 1, 1958

Social reformer and editor, was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the youngest of two sons of Frank Israel Kellogg and Mary Foster (Underwood) Kellogg. Frank Kellogg went to Texas after his lumber business failed; Mary Kellogg brought up her two sons thereafter. Paul Kellogg, after editing the student newspaper at Kalamazoo High School, from which he was graduated in 1897, gained journalistic experience on The Kalamazoo Daily Telegraph as a reporter and city editor.

Leaving Michigan, Kellogg went to New York City in 1901, enrolling at Columbia University. His work in philanthropic studies was financed by the New York Charity Organization Society. Charities, a magazine dealing with the application of philanthropic resources, invited Kellogg to serve as assistant editor; his brother Arthur, with whom he had done journalistic work in high school, began to work with Paul Kellogg here too. Injecting a concern for larger social questions into the magazine’s coverage, the Kelloggs contributed to its growing appeal. Paul Kellogg became managing editor in 1905 when Charities merged with the settlement house journal Commons.

In 1907 Kellogg left philanthropic journalism briefly to launch an innovative scholarly investigation of social conditions in Pittsburgh—an investigation that made his reputation, broadened his intellectual horizons, and become a stimulus for reform throughout the nation. Published in six volumes as the Pittsburgh Survey (1910-14), the study was the outcome of Kellogg’s coordination of the efforts of leaders in the academic and nonacademic communities of the city who collected a mass of information on everyday life and working conditions. This kind of study was consistent with both the progressive mood of the period, which encouraged the use of social sciences in dealing with everyday existence, and with Kellogg’s own urge to press beyond the narrow definition of philanthropy to a view of its place in the larger social scene. Kellogg’s findings provided support for continuing efforts to shorten the twelve-hour workday in the steel mills and enhanced arguments for changes in housing conditions and for workmen’s compensation legislation, both concerns of a national scope.

In 1909, the year he returned to Survey (the new name for his old magazine), Kellogg married Marion Pearce Sherwood, whom he had known in Kalamazoo. The Kelloggs, who had two children, were divorced in 1934. In 1935 Kellogg married Helen Hall, who headed the Henry Street Settlement in New York City.

Kellogg became editor in chief of Survey in 1912, and his brother became managing editor. Under the Kelloggs’ direction, the magazine attempted to do on a regular, and national scale what the Pittsburgh Survey had done intensively for one time in one city. Through the beginning of the post-World War II era, Survey sought to convey the details of what it considered to be an aberrant social reality and to campaign for liberal goals in social welfare and civil liberties. In harmony with their progressive ideals, the editors emphasized the importance of educating professionals and local leaders to accept their social-scientific view of the underprivileged; this process, they believed, would accelerate change. The causes they championed included labor legislation controlling hours of work, placing a floor under wages, and protecting women and children workers; social welfare programs—for example, aid to the unemployed and the elderly; collective bargaining for trade unions; rural electrification; and government subsidies for playgrounds, parks, and housing. The magazine also discussed the needs of women and minority groups.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, impelled by the depression of the 1930s, adopted many of the progressive programs favored by Survey and called on Kellogg to help draft the provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935. Survey not only supported New Deal welfare programs, but fought to strengthen many of them, including those designed to provide work for the unemployed. The journal could now work within the context of an already existing welfare policy, making technical proposals in its articles for more effective administration of particular programs and for innovative ways of dealing with such social issues as adult education and the treatment of juvenile offenders and prisoners. The magazine drew together two central concerns of the progressive era in which it had begun: the political institutionalization of economic welfare and community social work activity.

Survey eventually encountered its own economic difficulties in the more conservative decade following the war: it ceased publication in 1952. After the death of Arthur Kellogg in 1934, Paul Kellogg had experienced difficulties in running the journal himself.

Paul Kellogg engaged in a rich variety of political and intellectual activities outside his magazine. He helped to organize both the American Civil Liberties Union and the Foreign Policy Association (FPA) at the end of World War I, and he served as president of the FPA. Working with other liberals who opposed American entry into World War I, he gave his critical support after war had been declared by Congress, and hoped for Allied acceptance of democratic aims when victory came. While working for the American Red Cross he investigated the effects of war in Europe during 1917-18. He actively opposed the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1927 and fought for the shipment of arms to Spain in 1936-39 when the Spanish republic was besieged by the armies of Francisco Franco and the American Congress insisted upon neutrality. Kellogg became president of the National Conference of Social Work in 1939. His activism, journalistic and political, sprang from intimate contact with the needs of social work; he broadened the scope of the discipline, changing it from philanthropic concern to a social perspective that encompassed the energetic use of all the social sciences as a tool for reform. As a voice of the progressive spirit, pervasive until World War I and revived in different form by the New Deal, his Survey magazine provided a continuing sounding board and anchor for liberal political sentiments, not only about economic legislation but also on issues of personal freedom. Kellogg touched upon a wide variety of liberal causes in the spirit of progressivism, focusing on their connection with one another and with national politics. Kellogg died in New York City at the age of seventy-nine.

Kellogg’s publications include British Labor and the War (1919, with A. Gleason). The University of Minnesota has his papers and the papers of the Survey Associates. Biographical sources include The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 6 (1980) and C. Chambers, Paul U. Kellogg and the “Survey” (1971).