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T. J. Woofter Jr. and Government Social Science Research During the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2020
Abstract
The work of southern sociologist Thomas Jackson Woofter Jr. (1893–1972) is frequently cited by American historians, but his contribution to government policy on agriculture in the New Deal, Social Security in the 1940s, and demography in the Cold War remains underappreciated. He left the University of North Carolina to direct government research on rural relief in the 1930s, Social Security enhancement during and after World War II, and foreign population and manpower projections during the Cold War. Contributing to the delivery of essential programs in key agencies, he participated in internal and external debates over policy and social attitudes between 1930 and 1960. Woofter worked for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Farm Security Agency, the Federal Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency, improving data-gathering and assisting transitions in federal policymaking. This article assesses his role in those agencies, using official records, other primary materials, and secondary sources.
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8. “State Supervisors of Rural Research” folder, box 2, and Progress Reports, 4–9 and 11–16 March 1935, in “Weekly Progress Reports, 1935” folder, box 18, Records of the Division of Social Research, 1933–42, Records of the Works Progress Administration, Record Group (RG) 69, National Archives II (NA), College Park, MD. Carl C. Taylor, “The Beginnings of Rural Social Studies in the United States Department of Agriculture,” Rural Sociology 4 (June 1939): 219–28. Larson and Zimmerman, Sociology in Government, 195–97, 220–21. See also Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia, MO, 1966). On FERA and regional social workers, see Brown, Josephine C., “Rural Families on Relief,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 176 (November 1934): 90–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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15. New York Times, 19, 21, 22 June 1936, 13. Christian Science Monitor, 24 June 1936, 2. Pittsburgh Courier, 27 June 1936, 2.
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21. Boris, “Ellen Black Winston,” 245. On key questions about race and liberalism in the 1930s, see William B. Thomas, “Conservative Currents in Howard Washington Odum’s Agenda for Social Reform in Southern Race Relations, 1930–1936,” Phylon 45 (2nd quarter, 1984): 121–34. Woofter knew the urban liberals of the AAA and the younger New Dealers who strove for racial justice and tenants’ rights, such as Clark Foreman and Virginia Foster Durr, but he did not associate with either group.
22. Woofter and Winston, Seven Lean Years, 5–44.
23. Ibid., 45–87.
24. Ibid., 89–147.
25. Ibid., 148–73. On farm cooperatives, see Cowling, Ellis, Co-operatives in America: Their Past, Present, and Future (New York, 1938).Google Scholar
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49. Woofter to Agency Research Committee, 31 December 1947, file 025, box 55, RG 235.
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51. Federal Security Agency, Notification of Personnel Action re. T. J. Woofter, 12 September 1949, Woofter personnel file, NPRC. At the USFSA, Woofter received consistent “Excellent” efficiency ratings for judgment, planning, liaison, presentation, and procedural skills. He was at the top of the civil service professional salary scale (P-8, $10,330, under the 1948 Pay Act). Through the PAA, he collaborated with Social Security Board economist Eleanor Lansing Dulles and Swedish sociologist Alva Myrdal. Population Index 5 (April 1939): 80.
52. Jeffreys-Jones, CIA and American Democracy, 8–9. Jeffreys-Jones noted the CIA’s preference for recruiting outstanding senior staff using “the principle of the New Deal’s brain trust.” Woofter found himself working with several people he had encountered in the Roosevelt administration. The State Department’s head of Population and Labor, William T. Ham, had worked with Woofter in the BAE and the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life, as did Waller Wynne Jr., author of several Communist state population studies for the Census Bureau. Wynne had helped with research for Landlord and Tenant on the Cotton Plantation in 1936. A. Ross Eckler, deputy director of the Census, was a statistician in the FERA.
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57. “Population and Manpower Studies: Present Facilities and Requirements of the Intelligence Agencies,” [annex to memo to CIA director from Inter-Agency Committee on Population and Manpower Studies, 22 January 1948] CIA-RDP79-01142A000400010010-7, CL. The Chinese population baffled demographers. See Emily R. Merchant, “Prediction and Control: Global Population, Population Science, and Population Politics in the Twentieth Century” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015), 210. The CIA Office of Reports and Estimates distributed raw data from Central and Eastern European newspapers on repatriations, marriage, births and deaths, and employment by industry and sector. See “Information from Foreign Documents or Radio Broadcasts” [Czech press, 31 May–9 July 1949], 22 August 1949, CIA-RDP80-00809A0006000241136-3, CL.
58. Asst. Dir., ORE, to Chief, COAPS [State], 2 December 1949, CIA-RDP79-01143A000400010001-7, CL. EIC, Subcommittee on Population and Manpower, First Progress Report (10 April 1952–10 June 1952), 11 June 1952, CIA-RDP82-00283R000200130002-0, CL. EIC, Subcommittee on Population and Manpower, 1 October 1952, CIA-RDP92B01090R000200120002-4, CL. See Theodore Lit, Unions in Democratic and Soviet Germany: Contrasting Roles of Labor Organizations Under Free and Totalitarian Systems in Divided Postwar Germany (Washington, DC, 1953). Department of State Bulletin 13 (21 October 1945), 640–41. Hutchinson later ran the Behavioral Sciences Division of USAF’s Office of Scientific Research. Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant, 102, 110–12. Kulischer documented the Holocaust and wartime migration, after fleeing Vichy France in 1941. See Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York, 1948), vi; Kulischer, “Russian Manpower,” Foreign Affairs 31 (October 1952): 67–78.
59. First Progress Report, 11 June 1952, CL. Jacob S. Siegel, The Population of Hungary (Washington, DC, 1958). In the same series, see also Paul F. Myers and Wayman Parker Maudlin, Population of the Federal Republic of Germany and West Berlin (1952); Waller Wynne, The Population of Czechoslovakia (1953); Maudlin and Donald S. Akers, The Population of Poland (1954); Myers and Arthur A. Campbell, The Population of Yugoslavia (1954); US Census Bureau, The Population of Mainland China, 1953 (1955); Wynne, The Population of Manchuria (1958); Samuel Baum and Jerry W. Combs, The Labor Force of the Soviet Zone of Germany and the Soviet Sector of Berlin (1959). Jean van der Tak, Jacob Siegel interview, 21 June 1988, Demographic Destinies 1/3 (2005): 90; Jean van der Tak, Arthur Campbell interview, 16 February 1988, Demographic Destinies 1/2 (2005): 278–91. Campbell recalled (279), “I remember having made an age distribution for China around the time of their first census when they were not releasing very much information and you really had to make a lot of guesses about what their age distribution was.”
60. First Progress Report, 11 June 1952, CL.
61. EIC, Subcommittee on Population and Manpower, Second Progress Report (July–December 1952), 15 December 1952, CIA-RDP82-00283R000200130001-1, CL. Third Progress Report, 2 July 1953, and Fourth Progress Report, 23 August 1954, CIA-RDP82-00283R000200130004-8, CL. On USAF’s capacity for targeting population centers, see Taiwoo Kim, “Limited War, Unlimited Targets: U.S. Air Force Bombing of North Korea During the Korean War, 1950–1953,” Critical Asian Studies 44, no. 3 (September 2012): 467–92.
62. Ronald B. Frankum Jr. suggests Operation “Passage to Freedom” paved the way to US combat in Vietnam, having “established the moral obligation to ensure that those people’s lives would improve under a democratic government, free from the threat of communism.” See Frankum, Operation Passage to Freedom: The United States Navy in Vietnam, 1954–1955 (Lubbock, 2007), xx–xxi. Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst, 2005), 60–63.
63. Chief, Projects Control Staff, ORR, to Chief, Liaison Division, OCD, 2 September 1954, CIA-RDP79T00935A000300030002-7, CL; CIA/RR IM-389, “Population and Manpower in Indochina,” 1 September 1954, CIA-RDP79T00935A0002000360001-3, CL.
64. EIC Subcommittee on Population and Manpower to EIC Secretariat, 22 August 1955, CIA-RDP82-00283R000200130027-3, CL; and EIC evaluation of Population and Manpower, 1 November 1955.
65. John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security During the Cold War, rev. ed. (New York, 2005), 125–96. E. Raymond Platig, “The ‘New Look’ Raises Old Problems,” Review of Politics 17 (January 1955): 111–35. NSC 162/3, “Basic National Security Policy,” 30 October 1953, at https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-162-2.pdf
66. EIC evaluation of Population and Manpower, 1 November 1955, CIA-RDP82-00283R000200130027-3, CL. Annual Review of Activities … EIC Subcommittee on Population and Manpower, 8 August 1956, CIA-RDP82-00283R000200130026-4, CL. Annual Review of Activities … , EIC Subcommittee on Population and Manpower, 13 September 1957, CIA-RDP82-00283R000200130025-5, CL. Previous estimates relied on work by demographer Frank Lorimer. See Lorimer, The Population of the Soviet Union: History and Prospects (Geneva, 1946). The USAF and the Air Research Division of the Library of Congress produced annual demographic estimates for China and the Soviet Union and began an urban and regional series of 152 studies and a “Target Data Inventory.” Jean van der Tak, James Brackett interview, 29 March 1988, Demographic Destinies 2 (2005): 79–80; Jacob Siegel interview, Demographic Destinies 21 (June 1988), 1/3 (2005): 90.
67. Chief, Projects Control Staff, ORR, to Assistant Director, Research and Reports, 8 January 1957, CIA-RDP79T00935A000300030002-7, CL; CIA/RR IM-445, “Population Fertility in the USSR and the US, 1940–55,” 21 January 1957, CIA-RDP79T00935A0002000360001-3, CL. On challenges in estimating Soviet capabilities and spending, see W. T. Lee, “The Shift in Soviet National Priorities to Military Forces, 1958–85,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 457 (September 1981): 46–66. Lee worked for the CIA, 1951–64.
68. EIC Minutes, 6 July 1958, extract, CIA-RDP82-00283R000200130024-6, CL. Annual Report … on Population and Manpower for Fiscal Year 1958, 2 August 1958, CIA-RDP82-000283R000200130022-8, CL. The next Soviet census date was January 1959; the US Census was in April 1960. Frederick Chase Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton, 1960), 268–335. Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park, PA, 2003), 70–71. Elmer Plischke, “Eisenhower’s “Correspondence Diplomacy” with the Kremlin—Case Study in Summit Diplomatics,” Journal of Politics 30 (February 1968): 137–59.
69. Maj. William Y. Smith to Gen. Maxwell Taylor, 7 September 1961, Kennedy Library, at National Security Archive, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB56/.
70. Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (New York, 2008), 104–19. Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The US Crusade Against the Soviet Union, 1945–56 (Manchester, 1999), 202–3.
71. See, for example, James W. Brackett, Projections of the Population of the USSR, by Age and Sex: 1964–1965 (Washington, DC, 1964). Annual Report … on Population and Manpower for Fiscal Year 1958, 10 June 1958, CIA-RDP82-00283R000200130017-4, CL. Recommendation for Abolition of Subcommittee on Population and Manpower, 22 March 1966, CIA-RDP82-00283R000200210082-3, CL.
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