(Editors' note: This is the third in a series of articles by PAA Historian John Weeks, detailing the history of the PAA. These are excerpts from a book-length project that Weeks is undertaking, building on the work of the previous two historians, Anders Lunde and Jean van der Tak.)
From this distance in time it is difficult to tell what might have become of the Population Association of America and of population studies generally in this country without the early efforts of the Milbank Memorial Fund, orchestrated by Frederick Osborn [PAA President in 1949]. The PAA had languished somewhat under the initial four-year Presidency of Henry Pratt Fairchild, but in 1934 Frank Lorimer [PAA President in 1946], then a Research Fellow at the Eugenics Research Association, was named Secretary of the PAA. Lorimer, who had completed his doctorate at Columbia in 1929 after a short career in the clergy, had co-authored an influential book "Dynamics of Population" with Frederick Osborn. Osborn was well known to Albert Milbank, Chair of the Board of the Milbank Memorial Fund. Milbank and Osborn's father were both trustees of Princeton University. So, it was not a coincidence that The Milbank Memorial Fund, which after all had funded the initial meeting of the PAA, provided money to pay Lorimer's salary as a "permanent" Secretary to the PAA, in the interest of helping to launch the organization.
Lorimer responded to the challenge with two important initiatives. First, he recognized that the association could materially benefit its members by producing a bibliography of population literature and so, with the assistance of Irene Taeuber [PAA President in 1953] (whose time was paid for by a private donor), he published such a volume in 1935 and 1936, appropriately called Population Literature, but soon after to become Population Index. This work was undertaken in Washington, DC, where Lorimer's wife, Faith, held a high position in the US Department of Labor. He found space for the project at the office of the American Genetic Association in the Victor Building (only a block from the site of the 1997 PAA Annual Meeting). That office was headed up by Robert Cook, editor of the Journal of Heredity, and he had also granted desk space to Guy Burch, founder of the Population Reference Bureau and a former graduate student of Henry Pratt Fairchild at NYU. Cook later became President of the PRB after Burch's death in 1951, but he never served on the PAA Board.
Being in Washington facilitated Lorimer's second important project as PAA Secretary, which was to organize an annual meeting of the PAA to take place in Washington, DC in 1935 at the Willard Hotel. In conjunction with that meeting, the PAA sponsored a three-day Conference on Population Studies in Relation to Social Planning. Washington was deep into planning the New Deal, and the purpose of the conference was to focus attention on the importance of population studies in public policy. The meeting was very successful and was attended by Eleanor Roosevelt. Subsequent to this meeting, Lorimer was asked to be the Technical Secretary of the Committee on Population Problems of the National Resources Planning Board, and Irene Taeuber assumed responsibility for the population bibliography--which was about to move from Washington to Princeton.
In 1935 Fairchild became President of the American Sociological Association and Louis Dublin, another New Yorker, assumed the PAA Presidency. Meanwhile in New York City, Frederick Osborn had been encouraging the Milbank Memorial Fund to set up a University-based program in research and graduate study in population. His first choice was Harvard, but President Conant was not interested, so he turned his attention to Princeton University, to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which his father, along with Albert Milbank, had helped to establish. In 1936, The Milbank Memorial Fund signed the papers setting up a five-year grant to Princeton to establish the Office of Population Research. The University provided office space and Milbank paid the salaries. Milbank chose one of its own to head up the office, Frank Notestein [PAA President in 1947]. He was a research scientist at Milbank, and his being at Milbank had itself not been entirely accidental. Notestein had received his doctorate at Cornell under Walter Willcox, who was a member of the Advisory Council of the Milbank Memorial Fund (as was Louis Dublin), and had helped him to secure the job at Milbank working on a project dealing with differential fertility. In going to Princeton, Notestein was put in charge of the Office of Population Research with the title of Lecturer (and an academic appointment in the Department of Economic and Social Institutions). His budget included funding for a research assistant, a secretary-statistical clerk and an annual graduate fellowship. Notestein's first two assistants were Henry Shryock [PAA President in 1955] and Dudley Kirk [PAA President in 1959], and his first three fellows were John Durand [PAA President in 1961], Ansley Coale [PAA President in 1967], and George Stolnitz [PAA President in 1983].
When Lorimer left the position as PAA Secretary, the Milbank Memorial Fund transferred the funding to Princeton to enable the Office of Population Research to hire Irene Taeuber to continue the population bibliography, which was revamped and renamed Population Index. The first issue from Princeton was published in January of 1937. In addition to the bibliographic items, the Index contained two new sections: "Current Items" and "Statistics." For many years the "Current Items" section served as the unofficial newsletter of the Population Association of America.
The Princeton Inn was the focal point for the PAA Annual Meetings in 1936 and 1938 (no meeting was held in 1937 because of the IUSSP meetings in Paris). Indeed, Princeton was the venue for 9 of the 16 annual meetings held between 1936 and 1955. The latter year was the last one for meetings in Princeton because the organization had by then outgrown the available space. Having a locus of activity also stimulated new research activity in the field. Shortly after the Office of Population Research was established, Osborn talked the Carnegie Corporation of New York into making a grant to the Milbank Memorial Fund, which would then cooperatively coordinate a study of Social and Psychological Factors Affecting Fertility--the famous Indianapolis Study. The point person for this project was Milbank's Clyde Kiser [PAA President in 1952], whose wife, Louise Venable Kennedy (a noted sociologist and statistician), not coincidentally had been hired at the Office of Population Research to assist Irene Taeuber with the Population Index.
The US was drawn into World War II before the data for the Indianapolis Study could be fully analyzed, but the war created new population issues and opportunities. The end of the war was going to bring a new era to Europe and Kirk and Notestein began laying out a plan of research to study Europe's population. At about the same time, the League of Nations economic group moved from Geneva to Princeton and they commissioned a series of studies designed to enhance the quality of postwar planning. These studies, conducted at Princeton and funded by Carnegie and Milbank, included The Future Population of Europe and the Soviet Union by Frank Notestein, Irene Taeuber, Dudley Kirk, Ansley Coale, and Louise Kiser; Economic Demography of Eastern and Southern Europe by Wilbert Moore [a PAA Board member in the 1950s, but never PAA President]; Europe's Population in the Interwar Years by Dudley Kirk; and The Population of the Soviet Union: History and Prospects by Frank Lorimer. As these projects were unfolding, the US Department of State asked that the studies be extended to Asia. This produced the two well-known volumes, The Population of India and Pakistan by Kingsley Davis [PAA President in 1962]; and The Population of Japan by Irene Taeuber. The basic findings were summarized in a series of articles published in 1945 in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The issue was titled "World Population in Transition" and was edited by Kingsley Davis, who began his introductory article with this well-known blockbuster sentence: "Viewed in the long-run perspective, the growth of the earth's population has been like a long, thin powder fuse that burns slowly and haltingly until it finally reaches the charge and then explodes."
These studies firmly established the field of population studies at Princeton, which in turn helped to secure the future for the PAA. Frank Notestein was also convinced that their success was later instrumental in encouraging the United Nations to establish a Population Division.
The war caused travel to be limited and so the annual meetings of the PAA were canceled for 1943-1945, although "local meetings" were held in Washington, DC in 1943 and 1944. Since there were no annual meetings, the officers retained their positions throughout the war, awaiting a new slate of officers to be decided upon when the war ended and life returned to normal. But, life would never return to the pre-war norm because, as Kingsley Davis noted in that seminal 1945 article, there was an abundance of "population possibilities that lie ahead."