Dr. Arthur J. Vidich, a sociologist who chronicled social and economic changes in America after the Second World War, died on March 16th, at his home in Southampton, New York. He was 83.
The cause was complications from chronic lymphatic lymphoma, his son, Paul, said.
Mr. Vidich taught at The Graduate Faculty of Political & Social Science at the New School for Social Research for forty years. He was the author of numerous books and scholarly articles. He is best known for Small Town in Mass Society, co-authored with Joseph Bensman. The book, still in print and translated into several languages, rendered a candid portrait of “Springdale,” actually Candor, a rural community near Ithaca, New York. It is widely considered a classic in American sociology. It documented the extent to which urban bureaucracies and the norms of the emerging new middle class wholly dependent on big organizations had penetrated even the nooks and crannies of American society by the mid-1950s. Upon publication of the book in early 1958, Mr. Vidich was hung in effigy from the back of a manure-spreader at Candor’s Fourth of July celebration. The book created a sensation in scholarly circles.
Robert Jackall, Professor of Sociology & Public Affairs at Williams College said: “Small Town in Mass Society and the vigorous debate that followed its publication remain the best discussions of sociological fieldwork and the generation of theory from qualitative data in the social science literature.”
Mr. Vidich was born in Manganese, Minnesota on May 30, 1922, the youngest of four children, to Paula and Joseph Vidich, Slovene immigrants. A disabling accident in Manganese’s iron mines forced Joseph Vidich to move to West Allis, Wisconsin to find other work. Mr. Vidich’s second-generation immigrant experiences in the depression-era industrial town helped shaped the critical eye through which he later examined American society.
Mr. Vidich entered the University of Wisconsin in September 1940. His education at Madison was interrupted by the Second World War. In April 1942, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and, before being shipped overseas, completed his undergraduate education at the University of Michigan, majoring in anthropology. He served in the Pacific theater with the Second Regiment of the Second Marine Division, rising to first lieutenant and machine- gun platoon leader. On August 18, 1945, nine days after Nagasaki was devastated by the nuclear bomb, he disembarked in the port city as part of the first occupying force of the Japanese islands. His first-hand observations of the effects of the bomb on Nagasaki made him a life-long critic of nuclear weapons.
After his discharge from the Marine Corps, Mr. Vidich returned to the University of Wisconsin where he obtained his master’s degree in anthropology in 1948. Wisconsin’s illustrious faculty in the social sciences, which included Hans H. Gerth, the German émigré who brought Max Weber to American readers, was decisive in shaping his understanding of the great changes underway in postwar America.
In the fall of 1947, Mr. Vidich traveled to a remote Pacific archipelago and did six months of field work on the island of Palau. This became the basis of his master’s thesis, and later, in expanded form, his doctoral thesis at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations where he earned his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1950 under Barrington Moore.
In 1951, Mr. Vidich studied at the University of London on a Fulbright Scholarship. During that European visit he traveled to his parents’ birthplace in Kropa, Slovenia, and began a life-long relationship with Slovenian intellectuals.
After teaching for three years at the University of Puerto Rico, and three more years at the University of Connecticut, Mr. Vidich began his long career at The Graduate Faculty at The New School, which brought him into contact with scholars from around the globe. During those years, he held visiting professorships at the Universidad Nacional in Bogota, Colombia; Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan; Zagreb University, Croatia; and Tehran University, Iran.
In addition to Small Town in Mass Society, he wrote The New American Society: the Revolution of the Middle Class (with Joseph Bensman), and Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (with Guy Oakes), among many other books.
His first wife, Virginia, from whom he divorced in 1973, died in 1995; his second wife of thirty four years, Mary, died in 2003. He is survived by his sisters, Pauline Ruthenberg, Olga Shultz of Mesa, Arizona, and Betty Jauquet of Ashland, Wisconsin, and his children, Charles of Ashford, Connecticut, Paul and Andrew of New York City, Joseph of Wall, New Jersey, his step-children Max Gregoric of Rockville, Utah, and Rosilind Gutterson of Southampton, New York, and thirteen grandchildren.