Two classical essays, "Good People and Dirty Work" and "The Gleichschaltung of the German Statistical Yearbook: A Case in Professional Political Neutrality" witness of his lifelong commitment in sociology as a humanistic enterprise.
In his preface to a collection of his papers entitled The Sociological Eye Hughes writes I heard the Brown Shirts in the streets of Nuremberg in 1930 singing, "The German youth is never so happy as when Jewish blood spurts from his knife;" I wrote "Good People and Dirty Work" and used it as a special lecture at McGill University where in the 1930s I taught a course on Social Movements that came to be known as "Hughes on the Nazis."
He spent a year there 1930–1931 when he was preparing a study on the Catholic labour movement (Chapoulie 1996, 14) and returned after the war for visits together with a delegation of U.S. scholars.
Departments of language in universities are often so normative that they kill and pin up their delicate moth of poetry and stuff their beasts of powerful living profes before letting students examine them.
In 1923 he enrolled in the University of Chicago Department of Sociology and Anthropology, but continued working as public park director, a job that again put him in contact with immigrant communities (Chapoulie 1996).
Five weeks past his 86th birthday, Everett Hughes died of Alzheimer's disease at the Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had lived.
After his graduation he took a job at McGill University, where he, together with Carl Dawson, had the task to develop the sociology department at a time when it still was in its infancy.
He is recognized as either teacher or mentor to numerous well-known scholars associated with the Chicago tradition of qualitative, interactionist sociology, including Howard S. Becker, Erving Goffman, Anselm Strauss and Eliot Freidson (Chapoulie 1996).
Under Hughes's influence, the Chicago tradition of fieldwork-oriented interactionism continued in Brandeis, where scholars such as Irving Kenneth Zola came to be "changed forever" (Conrad et al. 1995).
When this was implemented in 1961 after Hughes' resignation, he strongly opposed what he perceived as a project of making sociological research appear as disembodied and detached from the social context where it was carried out (Abbott 1999, 146–147).
His Presidential Address, entitled Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination, was delivered on August 28, 1963, at the Association's Annual Meeting in Los Angeles.
His contributions to the training of sociologists during his time in McGill and in Chicago are well-known (Chapoulie 1996, Helmes-Hayes 1998, 2000, Abbott 1999), but his mentorship and teaching at Brandeis are also acclaimed (Homstrom 1984, Conrad et al. 1995, Weiss 1996).