Vignettes of PAA History:
Demographics of the Early PAA Boards of Directors

by John R. Weeks

(Editors' note: This is the second 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. The first in the series appeared in the Winter 1996 issue of PAA Affairs.)

During the initial 15 years of the organization, there were 48 different people who served on the PAA Board. The average age of Board members at the time of initial election to the Board was 43 (both mean and median), with the youngest person being Edward Hutchinson of the University of Pennsylvania--elected in 1936 when he was only 30. At the other extreme, four Board members were 55 when first elected to the Board. Three-fourths of the Board Members during this period had been born in the 19th century. The first Board member to have been born in the 20th century was Frank Notestein, elected in 1933 at age 31 while he was still with the Milbank Memorial Fund.

Only three of the 48 were women. The first woman elected to the Board was Dorothy S. Thomas in 1937.

She was teaching at Yale at the time. Margaret (Marny) Hagood was elected to the Board in 1942, while she was at the US Department of Agriculture. In 1945 Irene Taeuber of Princeton was elected to the Board. All three women eventually were elected PAA President. Dorothy Thomas was also President of the American Sociological Association, as were eight other early PAA Board Members (Henry Pratt Fairchild, Frank Hankins, Philip Hauser, William Ogburn, Samuel Stouffer, Carl C. Taylor, Rupert Vance, and Donald Young).

Columbia was the predominant school from which the early Board members had received their doctorates, accounting for 9 of the 48 (19%), followed by Chicago (5), Minnesota (5), Harvard (4), Wisconsin (4), Yale (3), Cornell (2), London School of Economics (2), North Carolina (2), and Pennsylvania (2). I have tabulated places of employment only by lifetime, not specific to this period, but the data show that among these early Board members the most often occurring place of employment was the US Bureau of the Census, followed by the US Department of Agriculture, Princeton, and Michigan. I have data on 76 jobs held by these 48 early Board members, and 64 percent of the jobs are in the eastern seaboard corridor between New York and Washington, DC (including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland). Dorothy S. Thomas was the most distant Board member, serving as Second Vice-President during the early 1940s while she was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.

(Note:A timeline of PAA events is available on the internet at typhoon.sdsu.edu/paa.html)