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Dr. Walter Dill Scott (1869-1955)

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Dr. Walter Dill Scott (1869-1955)  served as President of Northwestern University and was one of the founding fathers of a field then known as Industrial Psychology.  Now recognized for pioneering the integration of psychology in business, his career spanned both the academic world and corporate life as well as military service making him a well known public figure.  He developed one of the first successful means of testing and placing recruits in suitable military specialties during WWI. His work continues to be the focus of attention with an article on Ad Age a bio on Wikipedia as well as one on Bioscopes. Northwestern has an excellent biography online, as is the video produced at the University of Waterloo.

Several other books are online as well. A biography of Dr. Scott titled, Scott of Northwestern describes his full career. While out of print for many years, the book was digitized by HomePort.

Walter D. (Wally) Scott II, a namesake grandson, followed a business career but returned to Northwestern University as a Professor of Management in the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management. A history of the institution for a 100th anniversary noted the involvement of the grandfather and grandson at both the founding and the anniversary.

Dr. Walter Dill Scott's brother Dr. John Adams Scott followed a similar career track, in the field of Classics, with both brothers completing doctoral training and returning to teach at Northwestern University.

A feature length magazine article on Dr. Walter Dill Scott called Northwestern's Number One Alumnus in Northwestern University Alumni News, February 1939, is now available exclusively through HomePort.  The article includes sixteen photographs.

The following biographical article by Michael M. Sokal, is from the Dictionary of American Biography (Supplement 5) Page 611-612.

SCOTT, WALTER DILL (May 1, 1869 - Sept. 23, 1955), applied psychologist and educational administrator, was born on a farm in Cooksville, Illinois., the son of James Sterling Scott, a farmer, and Henrietta Sutton Scott.  His mother had taught school and Scott, feeling that opportunities on the farm were limited,decided quite early to become a teacher.  In 1888 he entered Illinois State Normal University, primarily for remedial work, and, with some time out for teaching, graduated in 1891.  That year, with a state scholarship and relying on tutoring to pay his expenses, he entered Northwestern University, where he bloomed socially, held several offices, taught at the Northwestern Settlement House, and played varsity football.

Scott graduated from Northwestern with the A.B. In 1895 and entered McCormick Theological Seminary in preparation for teaching at a Presbyterian missionary college in China.  In 1898 he received the B.D. degree but was unable to find such a post.  His work in philosophy at Northwestern under George A. Coe, his religious studies, and perhaps the problems he had faced while tutoring and teaching had, however, led him to a scholarly interest in the human mind.  Meanwhile, his elder brother John—who attended Illinois State Normal and Northwestern, and had earned a doctorate in Greek at the Johns Hopkins University—was teaching at Northwestern and proving the viability of a scholarly career.  Scott decided to study the new science of psychology at Leipzig under Wilhelm Wundt, thereby following the pattern of several other Americans whose interests in philosophy and religion had led them to Wundt.  Unlike the others, however, he did no laboratory work.  On July 21, 1898, before leaving for Germany, he married Anna Marcy Miller, whom he had met at Northwestern; they had two children.  Scott earned the Ph.D. at Leipzig in 1900 for a theoretical dissertation on the psychology of impulses.

In 1900, through the efforts of Coe and his brother John,  Scott was appointed instructor of psychology and pedagogy at Northwestern.  His first assignment included laboratory courses, so he spent the summer of 1900 studying under Edward B. Titchener at the Cornell University psychology laboratory.  Scott was promoted to assistant professor and director of the psychology laboratory in 1901,  to assistant professor in 1905, and to professor in 1908.

American psychologists had always attached greater importance to practical problems than had their German teachers, but Scott's work was more applied than that of most of his colleagues.  In 1901 he began lecturing before business groups on the psychology of advertising and published these talks in advertising magazines.  He stressed the importance of suggestion and annually reviewed the literature on the subject in Psychological Bulletin.  He even used suggestion in psychotherapy with patients referred by Chicago physicians.  Although Scott was not the first psychologist to study advertising, he apparently was the first to apply psychology to it.  In 1909, in addition to his regular university appointment, he became professor of advertising at Northwestern's new School of Commerce.  He also began studying psychological methods for the selection of personnel, and several Chicago firms consulted him regularly on advertising.

In 1916, on leave from Northwestern, Scott went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology as the world's first professor of applied psychology. here he directed the Bureau of Salesmanship Research, supported by local industry, and continued his work on the selection of personnel.  With his associates he developed and validated tests and rating scales for use by management.  During World War I, Scott modified these methods for use by the army, which established the Committee on the Classification of Personnel under his directorship, despite opposition from his fellow psychologists and from military men. The work of this committee was highly successful, and by the end of the war it had classified and rated the job qualifications of millions of men.  Scott had been commissioned colonel, and after the war was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and became a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.  He was also elected president of the American Psychological Association for 1919.

After the war Scott published a number of texts on the psychology of business and, with his army colleagues, organized a firm of "consultants and engineers in industrial personnel." Known as the Scott Company, it operated between 1919 and 1923, serving some forty-five industrial clients.

In 1920 Scott became president of Northwestern, from which he had been on leave since 1916.  In financial difficulties, and handicapped by inadequate facilities and faculty salaries, the university needed a capable administrator and fund raiser.  Scott stressed the service that Northwestern could provide for the Chicago area and presided over the establishment of a downtown campus for the schools of law, medicine, dentistry, and commerce.  Under his leadership Northwestern founded schools of journalism and education, a technological institute, extensive evening and part-time programs, and such specialized organizations as a scientific crime detection laboratory and a traffic safety institute.  These service-oriented agencies, and the public clinics of the law, medicine, and dentistry schools, reflected Scott's view of Northwestern's purpose.  When he resigned in 1939, the university was on a firm financial footing, despite the Great Depression and had acquired a well-deserved reputation as a model urban-service institution.

Scott's last years were spent out of the mainstream of academic and professional life, writing biographies of men important in the history of Northwestern, Evanston, and Chicago.  He also served as chairman of the editorial board of the American Peoples Encyclopedia and helped younger colleagues revise his texts.  He died at Evanston, Illinois.

[The most important manuscript collection is Scott's presidential papers at the Northwestern University Archives, which also include prepresidential material.  The Scott Company papers have been deposited at the Northwestern University Archives, Evanston.  Also important are the Walter Van Dyke Bingham Papers at the Carnegie-Mellon University Archives and the Robert M. Yerkes Papers at Yale University Historical Medical Library.

A fairly complete list of Scott's scientific publications is in The Psychological Register, Vol. III (1932).  Among the most important collections of his popular works on advertising and other business topics The Theory of Advertising (1903); The Psychology of Public Speaking (1907, 2nd ed., rev. by Clarence Simon, 1926); The Psychology of Advertising (1908; 8th cd., rev. by D. T. Howard, 1931); The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice (1908; 3rd ed., 1921); Increasing Human Efficiency in Business (1911), repr. as Psychology of Business (1969); and Influencing Men in Business (1911; 3rd ed., rev. by D. T. Howard, 1928).  Other articles, not collected are listed by Leonard W. Ferguson in The Heritage of Industrial Psychology (1962-1965), which places Scott's work in this area into context and examines parts of it in enlightening detail; and in Edmund C. Lynch, Walter Dill Scott: Pioneer in Personnel Management (1968), with discussion of Scott's career.

Among Scott's more important texts on applied psychology, often written with a younger colleague, are Science and Common Sense in Working With Men (1921), written with Mary H. S. Haves; and Personnel Management: Principles, Practices, and a Point of View (1923), written with Robert C. Clothier.

The only book-length biography of Scott is Jacob Z. Jacobson, Scott of Northwestern (1951).  Hagiographic in its approach and almost totally lacking in analysis, it is apparently based in part on notes that Scott himself prepared. Three unpublished doctoral dissertations that discuss aspects of Scott's work are Thomas M. Camfield, Psychologists at War: The History of American Psychology and the First World War (University of Texas at Austin, 1969); Donald S. Napoli, The Architects of Adjustment: The Practice and Professionalization of American Psychology, 1920 - 1945 (University of California at Davis, 1975); and David P. Kuna, The Psychology of Advertising, 1896-1916 (University of New Hampshire, 1976).  The New York Times obituary, Sept. 25, 1955, contains inaccuracies.]

MICHAEL M. SOKAL
Page 611-612 Dictionary of American Biography (Supplement 5)

A feature length magazine article on Dr. Walter Dill Scott called Northwestern's Number One Alumnus in Northwestern University Alumni News of February 1939 is now available exclusively through HomePort, as is Jacob Z. Jacobson's, Scott of Northwestern (1951)