Vignettes of PAA History - The Beginnings

This is the first of a series of articles by PAA Historian John Weeks, detailing the history of the PAA, excerpts from a book­length project that Weeks is undertaking, building on the work of the previous two historians, Anders Lunde and Jean van der Tak. These vignettes will proceed chronologically.

The stock market had recently crashed, the Depression was settling in, and Warren Thompson had already defined (even if he hadn't named) the Demographic Transition, on the cold, gray December day in 1930 in New York City when the Population Association of America was conceived. We know that there were 13 people at that meeting at Town Hall Club in uptown Manhattan, where Henry Pratt Fairchild (who became the first PAA President) was a member. Fairchild was Professor of Sociology at NYU and was a close friend of Margaret Sanger. The two of them are generally given credit for having inspired the PAA, but the organization would likely not have been formed had it not been for the separate, albeit interrelated, efforts of Ed Sydenstricker at the Milbank Memorial Fund (which funded the early activities of the Association) and Frederick H. Osborn (who provided much of the political muscle that allowed the Association to prosper and became, in turn, PAA President, and then the first President of the Population Council). The PAA was born partly as a result of, but also in the shadow of, the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (now the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population: IUSSP).In 1927, Raymond Pearl, biologist at The Johns Hopkins University, had helped to organize a World Population Congress in Geneva and this led to the creation of the permanent organization. It was not an organization of individual members, however, but of national committees. Thus, each member nation was asked to create a national committee, and that committee would elect a representative to attend the international meetings, with the second international meeting being scheduled four years later (still the IUSSP pattern) in 1931. Pearl (who was a PAA board member, but never PAA President) asked Louis Dublin at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, to chair the American National Committee. Dublin (also later a PAA President) was joined by Professor Fairchild, Alfred Lotka (also at Metropolitan Life and also a subsequent PAA President), C. E. McGuire (who never played a major role in the PAA), Lowell J. Reed (who became President of The Johns Hopkins University and also served as PAA President during World War II), Clarence C. Little (President of the University of Michigan and a member of the original PAA Board, but never served the PAA after that), and Pascal K. Whelpton (Warren Thompson's colleague at the Scripps Foundation for Population Research at Miami University, Ohio, and later, a PAA President).

During the late Winter and early Spring of 1931, subsequent to the Town Hall meeting at which the idea of an American Population Association was discussed, the development of the American National Committee of the IUSSP and the PAA progressed in tandem. The meetings to organize the American National Committee were typically held at the offices of Louis Dublin at Met Life on Madison Avenue. They would then adjourn that meeting and head either over to Professor Fairchild's office at Washington Square East on the NYU campus or uptown to the Town Hall Club on 43rd Street near Times Square, where the group would reconvene as the organizers of the PAA. The Milbank Memorial Fund provided funds for both efforts, including a $600 grant to help fund the first official meeting of the PAA on May 7th, 1931. That meeting, also held at the Town Hall Club (which space is now occupied by a school, above the still extant Concert Hall) was attended by 38 people, not including Margaret Sanger. She was, of course, a social activist, and Frederick Osborn had stepped in to request that she not be named to the Board of Directors because he felt that the organization should be devoted specifically to the promotion of scientific research and should not be influenced by activist pressures. This is an attitude that has continued to pervade the PAA (leading to conflict especially during the 1970s, as we shall recollect in a later vignette).

Osborn was not a professional academician by training (although he had a degree from Princeton and also spent a year at Cambridge). He was a wealthy man from an influential family who had retired from business in the 1920s to pursue his intellectual interests as a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (the same institution that later provided Paul Ehrlich's inspiration for population studies). It was there that he discovered the field of demography and was attracted to the demographic work being initiated in the 1920s by the Milbank Memorial Fund. Osborn's influence on the field of population studies was enormous, more because of his influence on resources than on his academic contributions, although he was co­author on a number of works in the field.

At the first meeting of the PAA in May of 1931, Henry Pratt Fairchild was elected President, and the Vice­president was William Ogburn (of the University of Chicago and an important contributor to the development of American demography although he never served as PAA President). The Second Vice­president was Robert Rene Kucynski (then at the Brookings Institute, but who almost immediately left the US to return to the London School of Economics), and the Secretary­Treasurer was Alfred J. Lotka. Following that meeting, a great deal of work went into developing a constitution for the organization, preparing incorporation papers, and defining the field of demographic studies. This work was presented to what is now usually called the First Annual Meeting of the PAA in April of 1932, once again at the Town Hall Club in New York City. The rest, as they say, is history.