When Watson was a young intro psych instructor at the University of Chicago in 1903 there was a student in his class named Mary Ickes who had such a crush on him that she wrote a long love poem to him in an exam book, instead of writing the actual exam answers. He made her turn in the book at the end of the test and she was so embarrassed she ran from the room. It couldn't have been so bad though, because he married her later that year. (Note to anyone considering this strategy: I haven't read anywhere that he actually passed her in that course!) In fact, they ran off to Altoona and got married in secret because Mary's brother didn't like him, and they got married again in public in 1904. (That brother, Harold, became FDR's secretary of the interior during WWII; his son -- Mary's nephew -- was an assistant to Bill Clinton who, despite having been fired right after helping Clinton get re-elected, made news when he later defended Clinton against accusations of fundraising wrongdoings.) Watson was smart, impressive, good-looking, not the nerdy type you'd think of when you think of turn-of-the-century academia. They had a good marriage for a while, and had a boy and a girl (Polly, whose daughter is actress Mariette Hartley). Watson got a job at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and became head of the psychology department in 1909. That was because James Mark Baldwin, the previous head and the editor of the Psychological Review, was caught in a brothel and forced to resign. He walked into Watson's office and basically said, hey, you're now the department head and the Psych Review editor, see you later. Baldwin took off to Mexico for a while, then moved to Paris, where he was welcomed by European psychologists and had a thenceforth obscure career. Watson benefitted from Baldwin's misfortune, but he apparently didn't learn any lesson from it, judging from later events...
1913 was the year he published his famous paper on behaviorism, which was pretty controversial to put it mildly. Also during this decade he worked with a young Karl Lashley - yeah, yeah, they did conditioning experiments and stuff, but they also did one of the first really probing studies of attitudes toward sex, which included some really specific (for the times) questions about sexual behavior. All his life Watson was a radical supporter of sex education, probably just because he was obsessed with sex. How unfortunate for him, then, that after an illness in 1915 his wife started to lose interest in sex, in him, finally, in everything except having a nice social life among the Baltimore elite. (But wait, it gets more unfortunate.)
In 1919, Rosalie Rayner graduated from Vassar and came to Johns Hopkins as a grad student. She collaborated with Watson on the famous Little Albert study of conditioned emotional responses in 1920. She collaborated with him on some other, uh, "extracurricular" stuff that same year. In fact, she had a friend in New York who gave them the use of her apartment on weekends for some intense collaborative getaways. Unfortunately, they were too much in the habit of writing up their work, and Mrs. Watson one day found in Mr. Watson's coat pocket a love note from Rosalie. Truth be told, it wasn't his first affair, or even the first one she found out about - but it sounded a little too serious for her. Her other brother, John, told her to get a lawyer, and the lawyer said she should try to find a note written BY her husband instead of TO him. (I find this part very funny...) Rosalie's parents were among the Baltimore elite that Mary Watson liked to hang out with: the prominent intellectual couple and the prominent society couple actually saw each other socially for dinner and such, DURING THE TIME THAT WATSON WAS HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH THEIR DAUGHTER! So here it goes - one night, over at the Rayners' for dinner, Mary Watson claims to have a headache and asks if she can go off and lie down for a while - and she goes to Rosalie's bedroom. Locks the door. Digs through stuff. Finds what she needs: "I've made enough love in one day to a girl so young -- you might grow weary in reading so much. I am so mad whenever I get to the end of one of your letters -- are you that way? Could you kiss me for two hours right now without ever growing weary. I want you all 24 of the hours and then I'd quarrel with the universe because the days are not longer. Let's go to the north pole where the days and nights are 6 mo. each. Your John." And how great is this: "I know every cell I have is yours individually and collectively. My total reactions are positive and towards you. So, likewise, each and every heart reaction." (Whatever that means.) And on an upcoming weekend visit to that friend's apartment: "Everything will be lovely and we ought to play safe. Still, play we will." These letters became the basis for the Watsons' separation in April 1920. No divorce yet - Mary's other brother John was apparently not so upstanding as Harold, and wanted to use the letters to extort money from Rosalie's parents. (Didn't work out for him, finally.)
The folks over at Johns Hopkins didn't like this story so much when they got wind of it. Watson thought it would blow over, but Baldwin's experience should have been a warning to him: these people wanted this scandalous affair with Rosalie to end, regardless of the state of Watson's marriage. Watson wouldn't end it. Rosalie's parents also wanted it to end - they wanted to send her to Europe for a while, and even threatened to cut her off financially. She was equally stubborn. In light of his ongoing affair, Watson was asked to resign in October 1920. You can imagine him being shocked - the biggest name in American psychology, how could they fire him! And what about all his "friends" in the department? No one supported him. Poof, his career was over. His psychology career, anyway...
November, the divorce gets to court and it's FRONT PAGE NEWS, in Baltimore especially, but also in New York and the rest of the country. Divorce was quite a big deal back then. What a scandal, the world-famous professor and his grad student - pretty juicy. Mary Watson comes out of it okay, with substantial alimony and both kids. (She remarried a year and a half later - obviously real broken up about the whole thing. Lived happily for another 50 years or so.) John Watson is left with only a third of his till-then-$6000 yearly income. What is he doing while the divorce is all over the papers? Not hanging around Rosalie, it turns out. He goes to New York to live with a friend for a while and try to figure out what to do next. He's 42 and he's been in school all his life. Luckily this friend hooks him up with some people who work for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, which, if you know anything about advertising, you'll recognize as one of the biggest names ever in that field. Watson gets a temporary job with them: he spends the rest of 1920 sloshing through the mud on the banks of the Mississippi, going door to door doing primitive market research: "I was green and shy, but soon learned to pull doorbells and stop wagons in order to ask what brand of rubber boots was worn by the family." Who should write him a letter of recommendation for his new job but Edward B. Titchener, the psychologist whose work was eventually displaced by behaviorism. (Titchener never gloated either; he was always supportive, urging Watson to try to get back to psychology.) Busy holiday season: Christmas Eve 1920, the Watsons' divorce is finalized. In the first few days of 1921, John Watson gets hired for real by the J. Walter Thompson company at a salary of $10,000. And he marries Rosalie Rayner. End of Act I.
Act II follows from Watson's attitude toward his misfortunes. No moping or whining: he took it really well and set to work at his new job. "I was a product of schools and colleges. I knew nothing of life outside the walls of a university." To get to understand the Consumer better, he spent the summer as a clerk at Macy's. Soon he brought his background as a student of human nature to bear on problems in the world of advertising. He did research showing that different brands of a product were indistinguishable to consumers; their buying decisions must be based on the product's image instead of on the product itself. He thus arrived at the basic tenet of modern advertising: sell the image! So he went out and got the Queen of Rumania and the Queen of Spain to do testimonial ads for Ponds Cold Cream. Sales went way up. He also realized that giving information wasn't enough - to sell, you have to create a need where none may have existed, then tell people how to satisfy that need with some product. So, we have Watson doing a half-hour educational radio broadcast on the physiology of the salivary glands, gums, and teeth, explaining how stimulation of the salivary glands is beneficial to healthy teeth. Although the brand name was never mentioned in the program itself, the sponsor was Pebeco toothpaste, "specially formulated to stimulate the salivary glands"; if listeners requested the additional information that was offered, they received a free sample of Pebeco toothpaste with its new and improved flavor (it had actually been famous for its foul taste!). Watson had no special expertise in the field of dental hygiene; he was just capitalizing on his academic reputation as a world-renowned scientist. John Watson, founder of behaviorism, was now also the inventor of the "infomercial"! And sales went way up. In 1924, he was made a vice president at J. Walter Thompson; Titchener wrote him a letter of congratulations but worried that Watson wasn't getting back into psychology. Well, what would you have done: in 1928 Watson was making $50,000; in 1930 he was making $70,000 -- at the height of the depression! (My brother, who works in marketing research, tells me that marketing isn't really affected by recessions and depressions and such, because companies become even more concerned with how to appeal to consumers).
For years Watson still wrote about psychology non-academically for magazines like Harper's and McCall's, and was largely responsible for popularizing psychology. Predictably, former colleagues (but never Titchener) chastised him both for writing popular science and for using psychology in advertising. He wrote of one critic, "I just wonder whether he or other of my colleagues confronted with my situation would not have sold himself to the public." He said such responses left him "with no bitterness but rather with a poignant sadness." One of his post-academic-era books was "The Psychological Care of the Infant and Child", from 1928, which he dedicated to the first mother to raise a happy child. This book was so popular that it was the accepted authority for child-rearing practices until Benjamin Spock's book replaced it in the 1940's. Too bad, because Watson's ideas were pretty screwy. Never hug or kiss your children, he said; treat them like small adults; too much mother love will warp them and make them into unsuitable mates later in life. (Sadly, although B. F. Skinner got to brag that his "baby in a box" grew up healthy and happy, Watson's application of science to child-rearing lacks that testimonial validity: William, the older of his and Rosalie's two sons, committed suicide at age 40, just four years after John Watson's death. The second son, James, remembers his father as kind but at the same time cold and distant.) In other articles he expressed odd views on sex (advocating explicit instruction in sexual techniques for adolescents to make them qualified mates later on, as well as encouragement of "wholesale necking" in college), on marriage -- or more specifically, "Why 50 Years From Now Men Won't Marry" -- and on life itself -- in an unpublished article called "Why I Don't Commit Suicide". This last was a survey which reported people's surprisingly downbeat reasons for going on living. It was rejected in 1932 by the editor of Cosmopolitan as being too depressing. (Six months later that editor killed himself!) In 1936 he offered a typically weird reflection on his scientific career: "I sometimes think I regret that I could not have a group of infant farms where I could have brought up thirty pure-blooded Negroes on one, thirty 'pure'-blooded Anglo-Saxons on another, and thirty Chinese on a third -- all under similar conditions. Some day it will be done, but by a younger man." Since his infant farms are no nearer to reality now, we don't have to worry about the bizarre implications of that experiment, but it's worth pointing out that Watson's commitment to environment as the only determinant of character made him very critical of the everyday racism that was so prevalent at the time.
From 1930 till 1950 Watson lived on a huge 40 acre estate in Westport right here in Connecticut; he commuted an hour and a half every day to work in Manhattan (the suburbs were a lot more "sub" back then). Always good with his hands, he built a barn with a big copper roof that was used as a landmark by major airlines through the 1950's. He never drove a car but raced his speedboat out on Long Island Sound. When occasional guests visited he would challenge them to outdrink him, secretly drinking a shot of olive oil first to prevent absorption of the alcohol. He would have won anyway -- Lashley reported that Watson's norm was about a quart of whiskey daily. He had moved from the Thompson agency to the Esty agency in 1936, but never got along with William Esty, so when Esty took to making fun of Watson's dapper manner of dressing (!) in 1947, Watson finally retired at age 68. In 1950 he moved to Woodbury, where he spent the rest of his life. In the summers he slept in the barn with his dogs.
Unhappily, he was all alone by then. In 1936, Rosalie had died suddenly, of either pneumonia or dysentery. He was so upset he sent William and James away for the night and only told them what had happened the next day; it's one of the few times they remembered him hugging them. By all accounts his marriage to Rosalie was incredibly happy the whole time. They were a popular couple in New York society; Rosalie even published an article called "I Am the Mother of the Behaviourist's Sons", and amazingly, Watson never cheated on her. All the scandal of 1920 was apparently worth it because everyone agrees that she was the love of his life. After she died he became a bit of a recluse, socializing mostly with his dogs.
By 1956 he had been nearly forgotten by psychology -- Tolman and Hull's debates had already come and gone, his student Lashley had demolished associationism on theoretical grounds, Skinner was gaining in popularity regardless, and Chomsky was writing "Syntactic Structures". To most psychologists of the time Watson was literally a legend; they didn't even realize that he was still alive. This fact became widely known due to a 1956 appreciation in the Psychological Review, in which the philosopher Gustav Bergmann wrote,"... I have not the slightest doubt that ... he is a very major figure ... His place in the history of our civilization is not inconsiderable and it is secure. Such men are exceedingly rare." In 1957 the American Psychological Association invited him to New York to receive a special award for his contributions to psychology. He went, but at the last moment he thought that he might break down in public, so he sent his son in to receive the award for him. The citation read: "To Dr. John B. Watson, whose work has been one of the vital determinants of the form and substance of modern psychology. He initiated a revolution in psychological thought, and his writings have been the point of departure for continuing lines of fruitful research." A year later he died at age 80.
Citation by the American Psychological Association at New York, New York, on September 2, 1957:
"To Dr. John B. Watson, whose work has been one of the vital determinants of the form and substance of modern psychology. He initiated a revolution in psychological thought, and his writings have been the point of departure for continuing lines of fruitful research."
Bergmann, Gustav (1956). The Contribution of John B. Watson. Psychological Review, 63:4, 265-276.
Second only to Freud, though at a rather great distance, John B. Watson is, in my judgment, the most important figure in the history of psychological thought during the first half of the century.
Understood or misunderstood, quoted or misquoted, his name and work are a symbol around which debate has swirled for quite some time...
Among psychologists the sound core of Watson's contribution has been widely accepted; his errors and mistakes have been forgotten.
... I have not the slightest doubt that, with all the light and all the shadow, he is a very major figure. Psychology owes him much. His place in the history of our civilization is not inconsiderable and it is secure. Such men are exceedingly rare. We ought to accept them and appreciate them for what they are.