Stern, Bernhard Joseph, 1894-1956

Columbia University Ph.D., 1927.

Dr. Bernhard Stern was a lecturer in anthropology at Columbia University in the 1930s and 1940s with a particular interest in race relations. Dr. Alain Locke was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and the principal spokesman of the "New Negro Movement," the black arts movement of the 1920s.

Bernhard Joseph Stern (1896-1956), American sociologist and anthropologist, author of Lewis Henry Morgan : social evolutionist (University of Chicago Press, 1931). In 1936, he became the American member of the editorial committee for the publication of complete works of Lewis Henry Morgan. The project, sponsored by the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, was evidently never realized.

Historian Edward Potts Cheyney taught at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bernhard Joseph Stern (1894-1956), was a social anthropologist at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research and an "independent Marxist" who worked hard for and wrote extensively about socialized medicine, freedom of speech, and rights of the foreign born, blacks and women.

Stern was born and initially educated in Chicago, Illinois. After a brief period at the University of Chicago, Stern went on to the Universities of Cincinnati (B.A. 1916, M.A. 1917) and Michigan, the London School of Economics and Columbia University (Ph.D. 1927). From 1927 to 1930, Stern was on the faculty in Sociology at the University of Washington, and from 1931 until his death he taught "by Socratic method" at Columbia and the New School.

From 1930 to 1934, Stern was Assistant Editor of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, and within it he wrote a celebrated article on the position of women in society (not included in this collection). His article on writing (11/2) expressed the standards he held of the writing of other contributors and of himself.

In the fall of 1936, Stern helped found the quarterly journal Science and Society, which adopted a Marxist approach in general, but did not print only Marxist writers. In 1943, Stern became Chairman of the Board of Editors and he served in that position until his death, which came the day after the twentieth anniversary issue was put to bed. That issue (Winter 1957) contains tributes by long-time friends and colleagues Corliss Lamont and Robert K. Merton, as well as a reprint of Stern's article on "Historical Materialism" that explains his Marxist views.

Stern began doing scholarly research in the late 1930's for the Commission on Human Relations, the Progressive Education Association, the National Resources Committee, the Committee on Research in Medical Economics, the Bureau of Educational Research in Science and the Carnegie Study of the Negro in America. The research, and reports for these institutes, comprised much of his published work of this period. In the early 1940's, he also became Secretary Treasurer of the Eastern Sociological Society, a position he held until his death.

In the early 1950's Bernhard Stern and his wife Charlotte Todes Stern, were among many Americans summoned by Senator McCarthy's Committee on Un-American Activities. Charlotte Stern was one of 25 literary names who defied the Committee and faced jail sentences. In addition, three of Stern's own books (all on medicine) were banned from the State Department's overseas libraries. As a result of this Committee's questioning and the "red scare", both the Sterns worked all the harder for the Bill of Rights guarantees.

At his death, Stern was survived by his wife, Charlotte, a literary name in her own right, and his daughter Mira.