Correspondence, Letters to Roger W. Sperry, 1943-1948

The Raymond Herbert Stetson Papers consist almost entirely of original letters that Dr. Stetson wrote to friends and colleagues. This personal paper collection was constructed by former Oberlin College Archivist William E. Bigglestone. In an effort to preserve the work of the late Professor Stetson, Bigglestone, with assistance of Stetson family members and Frederick B. Artz, solicited letters sent by Stetson to his friends (e.g. Robert Kimball Richardson [1876-1952] and James M. Snodgrass [1908-1994; A.B. 1931]), and over a period of years this collection was assembled. Given the way in which the collection was assembled, however, gaps in the record exist.

The content of the letters is overwhelmingly related to Stetson's research in the areas of speech and motor phonetics. The largest number of the letters center on his laboratory experiments and his subsequent writing on them. Letters to his peers in the Psychology field are the most detailed and useful in terms of understanding the techniques used in the experiments. Of special interest are Stetson's letters to former students and colleagues James Snodgrass, Clarence Hudgins (1897-1962) and Alfred Hubbard (b.1907) the correspondence of which represents the bulk of the collection. There are also letters to Arthur Slater-Hammel (1909-1992), James Pickett (1921-1996, A.B. 1943), and Roger Sperry (1913-1994; A.B. 1935).

The two areas that Stetson wrote about outside of his work concerned governance of the college and his service on various faculty committees. Stetson's involvement in the administration of Oberlin is outlined in his correspondence to several people, including Snodgrass, Hudgins, and Hubbard, but also in letters to associates outside of psychology like Robert Richardson.

Many of Stetson's letters from the period of 1938-45 deal with his views on World War II.

The manner in which Stetson composed many of his letters is to be noted. Stetson, for the sake of speed and space, characteristically abbreviated nearly every word of a letter over five characters in length, normally deleting most of the vowels. One is still able to ascertain the content in his letters, but this unusual style makes the task a bit more arduous for most researchers.

Aside from the correspondence, this collection also contains a number of Stetson's publications, as well as the publications of a few of his peers and students. These publications are useful when trying to place the research reported in his letters into an overall context. A volume of papers by a number of Stetson's former students appeared as a supplement to the American Journal of Psychology, in 1939 as a tribute to the retiring Stetson. These papers illustrate the various directions that Stetson's students took in their own research, and affirm the way in which Stetson's work served as a building block for their work in the field.