Frank Tannenbaum (1893, ?, Austria - 1969, New York) was an Austrian-American historian, sociologist and criminologist who immigrated to the United States in 1905. He received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1921 and later received his Ph.D. in economics from the Brookings Institution. He then moved to Mexico, where he conducted research on rural education and served as an adviser to President Lázaro Cárdenas. In 1932, he returned to the United States to teach criminology at Cornell University and in 1935 he joined the faculty at Columbia, where be became professor of Latin American history.[1] A notable student at Columbia was historian Robert Alexander.
Tannenbaum helped formulate legislation that established the Farm Security Administration.[2] His conception of the "Dramatization Of Evil" led to the further development of the symbolic interactionist labeling theory, widely used in both sociology and social psychology.
After retiring from Columbia University in 1965, he died in 1969. [3]