Charles Horton Cooley was born near the campus of the University of Michigan, where he spent almost all of his life. The Cooley family was originally from New England. They were direct descendants of Benjamin Cooley, who lived near Springfield, Massachusetts before 1640. Cooley's father, Thomas McIntyre Cooley, came to Michigan from New York. Thomas Cooley felt that his only chance for getting an education and moving up in life was to move west because he had been born into a large family of farmers. He settled in Michigan and first started on a career as an editor and real estate operator and then as a lawyer. An intensely ambitious and energetic man, he managed to rise from bad beginnings into a high and honored position among Michigan's legal and social people. He achieved recognition for the high caliber of his legal work and in 1859 was appointed a member of a faculty of three at the newly organized University of Michigan Law School. The same year of Charles' birth, his !
             father was elected to the Supreme Court of Michigan. He remained a Supreme Court Justice and professor of law for many years and became well known for a number of legal works.
             Charles, the fourth of six children, was born at a time when the family had already had considerable standing. They lived comfortably in Ann Arbor. Somewhat alienated from his hard-driving and success-oriented father, young Cooley early developed the withdrawn, passive, and retiring character that was to mark his life-style. For fifteen years he suffered from a variety of ailments, some of them apparently psychosomatic. Suffering from a speech impediment, he had few playmates and spent time daydreaming and doing solitary reading. Highly sensitive, he compensated for his insecurity by imagining himself in the role of a great orator and leader. The success that his father had in real life, Charles only dared to repeat in his imagination. His fondness for rides on horseback and for car...