Samuel J. Eldersveld, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Michigan and former mayor of Ann Arbor, Michigan, passed away in Ann Arbor on March 5, 2010, at age 92. This closed a chapter on an extraordinary association with the University of Michigan, the discipline of political science, and the city of Ann Arbor, associations that brought remarkable change to each.
Sam was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1917 and grew up in Muskegon, Michigan, where his father was a minister in the Christian Reformed church. He was raised in a Dutch family whose ancestors immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century. His early family experiences, the Dutch community in western Michigan, and the wider, more diverse Muskegon area played major formative roles in his development. He graduated from Muskegon high school, where his major activities in addition to his academic work were the debate team and the thespian society, contributing to traits we would all come to recognize.
Following high school, Sam attended Muskegon Junior College for two years and then graduated from Calvin College in Grand Rapids in 1938. In August 1938, he began graduate work in political science at the University of Michigan, an attachment, as Sam put it, that he never left. He received his MA in 1939 and was well into his dissertation studying urban voting patterns to understand how political party structures changed after World War I and the impact of these changes on presidential elections when this research was interrupted by service in the communications section of the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific from 1942 to 1946. He returned to Ann Arbor in March 1946, and his Ph.D. dissertation was accepted in August 1946. He received an appointment as an instructor in political science for fall 1946, beginning his long tenure in the Michigan department, a department he would transform over the next 25 years.
Although trained in traditional (for the 1930s) political science, Sam became a leader in the behavioral transformation of the discipline through his own scholarship and leadership. Collaborations with Morris Janowitz and Dwaine Marvick at the University of Michigan and attendance at a Social Science Research Council summer long conference at the University of Chicago in 1951 persuaded him that this was the necessary direction for political science and for the Michigan department. Sam, along with his students, designed and conducted one of the first field experiments since Harold Gosnell's work in the 1920s to test the efficacy of different methods of voter contact on stimulating people to vote. The results of this study were published in the APSR in 1956. Also published in 1956 was the seminal book Political Behavior, coedited with Heinz Eulau and Morris Janowitz.
The Chicago seminar stimulated a second and more ambitious study. This study of party organizations integrated data collected from top elites, precinct activists, and the mass public. When published in 1964 as Political Parties: A Behavioral Analysis, the resulting book received the Woodrow Wilson award from the APSA as the best book published that year. This work was a long way from the traditional political science in which Sam was trained and marks a remarkable path of curiosity, creativity, self-education, and disciplined scholarship.
In 1954, Sam was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for the Netherlands. This was a significant event that marked a major new direction in his scholarship. He had wanted to include work in the Netherlands as part of his dissertation because of its multiparty system, but this desire was blocked by the onset of World War II and the Nazi invasion of his ancestral homeland. The fellowship also marked the beginning of a scholarly journey that would take him around the globe. The work in the Netherlands is quintessential Eldersveld, combining mass data on party contact and participation with elite interviews. The ultimate elite respondent was Queen Juliana, who responded to his mail questionnaire. A second trip to the Netherlands followed in 1961, during which Sam pursued his study of Dutch parties and their contrast with U.S. parties.
Sam's next venture in comparative research, and one for which he became internationally renowned, began in 1963, when he applied for and received a “beginner scholar” grant from the American Council for Indian Studies. This enterprise offers clear insight into Sam's intellectual curiosity and his devotion to pursuing where that curiosity led. As he admitted, he was not an Indian specialist, but he was intrigued by their multiparty system and their administrative processes. During the first stay in India, he initiated four different projects: a study of local party activists, a study of local development administration, interviews with members of the Indian parliament, and the beginning of a national election study. These were the first of many trips to and projects in India, resulting in several publications including Citizens and Politics: Mass Political Behavior in India, coauthored with Bashir Ahmed, which was the first national election study in India.
His most recent comparative adventure, on which two of us had the pleasure and privilege of working as his collaborators, began at the point that most faculty are enjoying emeritus status. In 1988, Sam began an extended collaboration with scholars from Peking University and the University of Michigan studying political and economic reform in China. This became an extended field study of mass and elite attitudes and behavior in rural towns and villages during a period of transition in Chinese politics. After numerous political and legal obstacles, the study was completed in 1993. Sam followed this up with a second set of interviews in 1996, which culminated in a book coauthored with Shen Ming-Ming, Support for Economic and Political Change in the Chinese Countryside: An Empirical Study of Cadres and Villagers in Four Counties, 1990 and 1996. The project created many memories and friendships. One that stands out is the radically altered dynamic of the project when the Chinese participants and people we interviewed discovered that Sam was a former mayor of Ann Arbor. From that point on, he was a ganbu, a leader, or, more likely, an exalted leader. Sam fit the title and played the role perfectly and always to the project's advantage. He had no difficulty moving from the study of political elites to being one, and vice-versa.
A significant feature of these comparative studies and the resultant publications is that they were all done and coauthored with scholars from the respective countries. Sam began these projects because of his intellectual curiosity, his desire to learn and study political parties in a broad context, and an innate commitment to teach and collaborate with other scholars.
In addition to the Woodrow Wilson Award, Sam received much professional recognition for his scholarship. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. In 1987, the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA created the Eldersveld Lifetime Contribution award and immediately presented it to Sam. Closer to home, the University of Michigan recognized Sam as the Senior Distinguished Professor lecturer for 1986 and the department's conference room was named the Eldersveld Room.
Sam's approach to academic organizations was just as farsighted as his approach to his scholarship. He became chair of the Michigan political science department in 1964, with the goal of making it one of the country's best departments. He was determined that the department would hire the “brightest and best,” regardless of any defined positions or slots. During the period of his chairship, the department hired 30 new faculty members, while losing 17 to retirement, death, or moves to other universities. It was both the absolute growth and the replacements that made the department a top department.
He also believed that the behavioral approach he adopted for his own work was the future for the department. When recruiting one of those 30 new members, who later became a very prominent scholar at Michigan, one of Sam's older colleagues remarked that what this person did was not political science. To which Sam responded, “This may not be the way we were taught to do political science, but it is the way political science will be done in the future.” Just as his own work moved away from his traditional training, so the department moved away from its traditional roots. Sam was not dogmatic in pursuing this view, but the department certainly acquired a behavioral orientation and reputation during his tenure.
Sam showed the same vision and skill used to transform the political science department in significantly altering the teaching and research used to train public officials. When he became department chair, most of the appointments and work in the Institute of Public Administration were located in political science. Sam saw that an interdisciplinary approach using many of the behavioral and analytical concepts that he had pushed the department to adopt needed to be the basis for a new public policy curriculum. As department chair, Sam was in a position to encourage the public administration faculty to adapt or look for new positions. He was appointed to chair a committee to define the future for the Institute and its educational and scholarly mission. The result was the creation of the Institute of Public Policy Studies, built on a multidisciplinary faculty drawn from a number of departments and other units. The Institute became a leader in the emerging field of public policy and ultimately became the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
Sam did not just study political leaders, he was one. In the mid-1950s, he applied what he had learned about party organizations and voter turnout to become Ann Arbor's first Democratic mayor since 1931. His research had shown that personal contact was the most effective way to get people to the polls. To implement that finding, his campaign created organizations in each precinct whose task was to contact those likely to vote Democratic. Then, a well-organized phone bank contacted these people again on Election Day. This organizational work was backed by continuing survey work under the direction of Morris Janowitz. With this political machine behind him, Sam collected 53% of the vote to become mayor in April 1957.
The election was followed by a steady stream of confrontations with the Republican-dominated City Council. In most of these confrontations, Sam routinely showed his Dutch tenacity and frequently prevailed. On of his proudest accomplishments was the passage of a human rights ordinance and the creation of the state's first Human Relations Commission to investigate and report on allegations of discrimination. This commission, renamed the Human Rights Commission, still exists.
Sam was a formidable and courageous administrator, both academically and governmentally. Organizations large and small, private and public, reach a point of needing bold reforms, and some leaders have clear visions of the future, but both languish because of inability and lack of courage to act decisively. As evidenced in his positions as department chair, mayor, and advisor to the Institute of Public Administration and then the Institute of Public Policy Studies, Sam saw when radical changes needed to be made and exercised the leadership to execute them, often in the face of strenuous resistance.
Sam's personal life had it various moments, but a highlight was when he met Els Nieuwenhuijsen at a meeting of the Netherlands American University League in October 1985. This meeting blossomed into a deep friendship, with Els traveling with Sam to China, among other places. They were married in 2000, and Els became much more than a partner for Sam. She helped with his last two projects after his eyesight and then his health began to fail. She was devoted to him and vice-versa. Her presence for the last 25 years of his life had a profound effect on Sam that was evident to all. Sam had two children, Lucy Angeline Murphy and Samuel Keith Eldersveld, and two grandchildren, Colin and Beth, that he adored and valued.
A constant in all his ventures was Sam's honesty, directness, and commitment to social justice. As an administrator, he emphasized transparency. One always knew where one stood with Sam. He had reasons for doing things, and he stated them openly and honestly. The policies and decisions he espoused were often opposed, but his candor always contributed positively to the health of the organization. His commitment to social justice at all levels of society is legendary, as evidenced by his pride in the Ann Arbor Human Rights Commission and his encouragement of Els's work with the Ann Arbor Disability Commission. Sam's passing is to be lamented, but his legacy and contributions evident in his students, family, scholarship and the institutions he led will be with us and treasured forever.
