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Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum

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I read this book eight years ago on rainy Saturday--I was a student at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, and I decided to pass the afternoon in the Center's library. I picked this volume off the shelves because the title sounded interesting. At the time, I did not realize that this book is a classic in the field of social science.

When it was published in the 1940s, it was one of the very first attempts to apply the techniques of modern social research to an American subculture--in this case, to the inhabitants of a poor Italian neighborhood in a large, unspecified northeastern city (Boston). Up to that time, social scientists generally studied the U.S. society as a whole--while it was considered standard practice for Margaret Meade to journey to an island in the South Pacific to study the sexual mores of neolithic villagers, the prospect of Mr. Whyte going across town to concentrate his study on the social, educational, and vocational development of the sons and daughters of immigrants was revolutionary in the early 1940s. Whyte buried himself in the work, to the extent of moving in to an apartment in the neighborhood and learning to speak fluent Italian.

This book is a blueprint for how social research on a subculture should be done. If it, at times, seems plodding and stilted to twenty first century readers, that is because it represents a prototype for a sort of study that has been replicated and perfected through these past sixty years.

The book represents a look at a segment of American society, as it existed at a specific point in history (the tail end of the depression)--much of the society Whyte studied had already changed by the time the book saw print (by 1943, one must assume that most of the young men profiled in the study were in uniform), however that is true to some extent of all social research.