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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

MARK ELLIS
MARK ELLIS*
Affiliation:
University of Strathclyde
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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.

Keywords

New Deal farm policySocial Security programsCold War demographyWoofter
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 241 - 272
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

Notes

1. Larson, Olaf F. and Zimmerman, Julie N., Sociology in Government: The Galpin-Taylor Years in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1919–1953 (University Park, PA, 2003)Google Scholar, passim; Bulmer, Martin, ed., Social Science Research and Government: Comparative Essays on Britain and the United States (Cambridge, 1987), 2–3Google Scholar. See also Gilbert, Jess, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven, 2015), 48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gilbert describes the U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics in the 1920s as “the largest social-science research agency in the federal government and perhaps the largest body of economic experts in the Western world.”

2. For examples of work noting Woofter’s research, see Grantham, Dewey W., The South in Modern America: A Region At Odds (New York, 1994), 147Google Scholar; Wiese, Andrew, “Blacks in the Suburban and Rural Fringe,” in Historical Roots of the Urban Crisis: African Americans in the Industrial City, 1900–1950, ed. Taylor, Henry Louis Jr. and Hill, Walter (New York, 2000), 158, 166–70Google Scholar; Badger, Anthony J., Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1980), 240Google Scholar; Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill, 1997), 7Google Scholar; Killian, Lewis M., White Southerners (New York, 1970), 93–94Google Scholar; Mark Lowry II, “Population and Race in Mississippi, 1940–1960,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61 (September 1971): 576, 588; Aiken, Charles S., The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War (Baltimore, 1998), 35–39Google Scholar, 52–53. I wish to thank the anonymous JPH reviewers for all their comments.

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4. Woofter, T. J. Jr., Negro Migration: Changes in Rural Organization and Population of the Cotton Belt (New York, 1920)Google Scholar. His PhD was the first correlational study to use multiple regression techniques, according to Turner, Stephen P., “The World of the Academic Quantifiers: The Columbia University Family and Its Connections,” in The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940, ed. Bulmer, Martin et al. (New York, 1991), 283Google Scholar. Woofter, T. J. Jr. and Headley, Madge, Negro Housing in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1927)Google Scholar. Negro Problems in Cities, ed. Woofter, T. J. Jr. (Garden City, NY, 1928)Google Scholar. Woofter, “The Negro and the Farm Crisis,” Social Forces 6 (June 1928): 615–20. Woofter, “Race in Politics: An Opportunity for Original Research,” Social Forces 7 (March 1929): 435–38. Woofter, Black Yeomanry: Life on St. Helena Island (New York, 1930). Woofter, The Plight of Cigarette Tobacco (Chapel Hill, 1931). Woofter, “Race Relations,” American Journal of Sociology 36 (May 1931): 1039–44. T. J. Woofter and Edith Webb, “A Reclassification of Urban-Rural Population,” Social Forces 11 (March 1933): 348–51. Woofter, “Common Errors in Sampling,” Social Forces 11 (May 1933): 521–25. Woofter, “Difficulties in Measuring Racial Mental Traits,” Social Forces 13 (March 1935): 415–18. On his career before 1930, see Ellis, Mark, Race Harmony and Black Progress: Jack Woofter and the Interracial Cooperation Movement (Bloomington, 2013).Google Scholar

5. T. J. Woofter, “A Study of the Economic Status of the Negro,” June 1930, file 377, series I, frames 253–375, reel 19, Papers of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, 1919–44, Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center. Woofter, “The Status of Racial and Ethnic Groups,” in Recent Social Trends in the United States, vol. 1, ed. William F. Ogburn, Howard W. Odum, and Edward E. Hunt (New York, 1933), 553–601; and Woofter, Races and Ethnic Groups in American Life (New York, 1933). Woofter, “The Tennessee Valley Regional Plan,” Social Forces 12 (March 1934): 329–38; Woofter, “The Tennessee Basin,” American Journal of Sociology 39 (May 1934): 809–17. Woofter correspondence re. “The Tennessee Valley Study, 1933–1934,” in Howard W. Odum Papers, Southern Historical Collection (SHC), Wilson Library, University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. Sosna, Morton, In Search of the Silent South (New York, 1977), 61–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Woofterism,” Crisis 39 (March 1931): 81–83. Du Bois wanted to “restore to the American Negro his rightful hegemony of scientific investigation and guidance of the Negro problem,” and he disliked how easily white academics gained support for race studies. Du Bois to Ira DeA. Reid, 14 April 1939, in The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, Volume II, Selections, 1934–1944, ed. Aptheker, Herbert (Amherst, 1976), 187–91.Google Scholar

6. Woofter, “The Subregions of the Southeast,” Social Forces 13 (October 1934): 43–50. See also Woofter’s critical review of Odum and Moore, American Regionalism (1938), in Rural Sociology 4 (June 1939): 250–52, and Vance, Rupert Bayless, Regionalism and the South: Selected Papers of Rupert Vance, ed. Reed, John Shelton and Singal, Daniel Joseph (Chapel Hill, 1982), 189–90.Google Scholar

7. Woofter, “Southern Population and Social Planning,” Social Forces 14 (October 1935): 16–22; Woofter, “Rural Relief and the Back-to-the-Farm Movement,” Social Forces 14 (March 1936): 382–88. News-Chronicle (Shippensburg, PA), 14 April 1936, 4. Woofter approved of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the homestead element of the National Industrial Recovery Act. Woofter to Howard Odum, 5 April 1935, folder W-General, box 42, Odum Papers, SHC, UNC.

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

9. “T. J. Woofter” folder, box 2, and Progress Report, 7–12 October 1935, in “Weekly Progress Reports” folders, box 19, RG 69, NA. Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner, 25 October 1935, 16; Salt Lake Tribune, 26 October 1935, 18, 27 October 1935, 54. On FERA research, see Howard B. Myers, “The General Development and Present Status of the FERA Research Program,” Social Forces 13 (May 1935): 477–81, and Dwight Sanderson, “The Contribution of Research to Rural Relief Problems,” Social Forces 13 (May 1935): 482–85.

10. Woofter, T. J. Jr. and Whiting, T. E., “Households and Persons Receiving Relief or Assistance,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 33 (June 1938): 363–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In 1941, Woofter and Whiting, a WPA statistician, produced the first comprehensive summary on all New Deal agencies and programs. Whiting, Theodore E. and Woofter, T. J. Jr., Summary of Relief and Federal Work Program Statistics, 1933–1940 (Washington, DC, 1941).Google Scholar

11. Loomis, Charles Price and Beegle, Joseph Allan, A Strategy for Rural Change (New York, 1975), 495Google Scholar. For examples of WPA Division of Social Research monographs and other reports, see Wynne, Waller Jr., Five Years of Rural Relief (Washington, DC, 1938)Google Scholar; A. R. Mangus, Changing Aspects of Rural Relief (1938); R. S. Kifer and H. L. Stewart, Farming Hazards and the Drought Area (1938); E. A. Schuler, Social Status and Farm Tenure: Attitudes and Social Conditions of Corn Belt and Cotton Belt Farmers (1938); Carl C. Taylor, Helen W. Wheeler, and E. L. Kirkpatrick, Disadvantaged Classes in American Agriculture (1938); and Carle C. Zimmerman and Nathan L. Whetten, Rural Families on Relief (1939); Joseph Gaer, Toward Farm Security: The Problem of Rural Poverty and the Work of the Farm Security Administration (1941). For nongovernment rural poverty studies, see Johnson, Charles S., Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago, 1934)Google Scholar; Johnson, Charles S., Embree, Edwin R., and Alexander, W. W., The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy (Chapel Hill, 1935)Google Scholar; Vance, Rupert B., How the Other Half Is Housed: A Pictorial Record of Subminimum Farm Housing in the South (Chapel Hill, 1936)Google Scholar; Raper, Arthur and DeA, Ira. Reid, Sharecroppers All (Chapel Hill, 1941)Google Scholar; Agee, James and Evans, Walker, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston, 1941).Google Scholar

12. Woofter, Landlord and Tenant on the Cotton Plantation, xviii, passim. On official sentiment, see Grubbs, Donald H., Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill, 1971), 136 –61.Google Scholar

13. Express (Lock Haven, PA), 9 August 1935, 8.

14. Report of Activities, 2 January 1937, Misc. Memoranda, 1935–37 folder, box 3, Central Office Records, RG 69, NA. Pittsburgh Press, 4 October 1936, 2; New York Times, 20 December 1936, 8; Washington Post, 20 December 1936, M5; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 20 December 1936, 21; Shreveport (LA) Times, 21 December 1936, 6. On the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act, see Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill, 1968), 126–92. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “A Message to Congress on Farm Tenancy. February 16, 1937,” in Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt: 1937 Volume, The Constitution Prevails (New York, 1941), 80–85. Academic reviews of Landlord and Tenant were largely positive, such as reviews by Edgar T. Thompson in American Journal of Sociology 43 (May 1938): 1007–9, and C. O. Brannen in Rural Sociology 4 (June 1939): 257–58. Radical scholars demanded a more explicit critique of the AAA and accused government researchers of being “politically timid,” such as the review by Louise Pearson Mitchell in Journal of Negro History 22 (July 1937): 350–53.

15. New York Times, 19, 21, 22 June 1936, 13. Christian Science Monitor, 24 June 1936, 2. Pittsburgh Courier, 27 June 1936, 2.

16. Holley, William C., Winston, Ellen, and Woofter, T. J. Jr., The Plantation South, 1934–1937 (Washington, DC, 1940), iii, xi, xv–xxii.Google Scholar

17. Winston paid tribute in his obituary to Woofter’s mentoring of junior staff. Ellen Winston, “Thomas Jackson Woofter, 1893–1972,” Footnotes 1 (January 1973): 6. Her PhD on poverty in southern subregions was supervised by University of Chicago demographic sociologist William F. Ogburn. In 1944, Winston became North Carolina commissioner of public welfare and, in 1963, the first U.S. commissioner of welfare in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Eileen Boris, “Ellen Black Winston: Social Science for Social Welfare,” in North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2, ed. Michele Gillespie and Sally G. McMillen (Athens, 2015), 238–61. In 2002, disclosures about sterilization under the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, which Winston chaired, led to a gubernatorial apology. See Johanna Schoen, Coercion and Choice: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill, 2005), 75–139, 241–50. John Railey, Kevin Begos, and Danielle Deaver, “Little Notice and Less Explanation,” Winston-Salem Journal, 16 February 2003, at http://extras.journalnow.com/againsttheirwill/parts/epilogue/storybody8.html.

18. Woofter, T. J. Jr. and Winston, Ellen, Seven Lean Years (Chapel Hill, 1939), v, vi–vii, 2.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., 84–85. Woofter, Black Yeomanry, 119–20.

20. Woofter and Winston, Seven Lean Years, 154–55. The average monthly payment to sharecropper families in June 1935 was $9. Loomis, Charles P. et al., Standards of Living in the Great Lakes Cut-Over Area (Washington, DC, 1938).Google Scholar

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

26. Woofter and Winston, Seven Lean Years, 174–76.

27. Ibid., 149, 151, 176. See also Carle C. Zimmerman, review of Seven Lean Years, in American Journal of Sociology 45 (November 1939): 496–97. Popular treatments of federal rural research included Tolley, Howard R., The Farmer Citizen at War (New York, 1943)Google Scholar, on New Deal planners’ preparations for the coming war, and Raper, Arthur, Tenants of the Almighty (New York, 1944)Google Scholar, partly devoted to the DFPRL’s land-use planning programs as they operated in Greene County, Georgia.

28. Gilbert, Planning Democracy, 47, Part II. Congressional opinion was wary of land-use interventions, especially when farm policy and race intersected. Larson and Zimmerman, Sociology in Government, 51–55, 224–44. See also Leo J. Zuber, review of Seven Lean Years, in Tennessee Planner 1 (January–February 1940): 19–22.

29. Personnel File, Thomas Jackson Woofter Jr. (d.o.b. 6/18/93), Civilian Personnel Records, National Personnel Records Center (NPRC), St. Louis. Dykeman, Wilma and Stokely, James, Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander (New York, 1962), 224–50.Google Scholar

30. New York Times, 24 May 1940, 21. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, 76th Congress, Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, 23 May 1940, 669–709. Congressional criticism contributed to the resignations of both Alexander and Baldwin. The FSA was replaced by the Farmers Home Administration in 1946. Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, 325–402. On the FSA, see also Roberts, Charles Kenneth, The Farm Security Administration and Rural Rehabilitation in the South (Knoxville, 2015)Google Scholar; Larson and Zimmerman, Sociology in Government, 202–19; Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics, 129–32.

31. Woofter, T. J. Jr. and Fisher, A. E., The Plantation South Today (Washington, DC, 1940)Google Scholar. Bradford (PA) Evening Star, 25 June 1940, 6; New York Age, 9 November 1940, 11. Larson and Zimmerman, Sociology in Government, 203–4, 221. Biles, Roger, A New Deal for the American People (DeKalb, 1991), 67–68Google Scholar, 75. Graham, Otis L. Jr., Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (New York, 1976), 44–45Google Scholar. Woofter advised southern reform spokesman UNC President Frank Porter Graham before his testimony to the Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate Unemployment and Relief in March 1938 and advised the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal on southern race relations for An American Dilemma (1944). James F. Byrnes to Graham, 23 February 1938; Ray E. Wakeley to Graham, 2 March 1938, folder 705, Frank Porter Graham Papers, Subseries 1.1, 1938, SHC, UNC. Progress reports, 29 April, 17 June, 1 July, 15 July 1939, in “Weekly Progress Reports” folder, box 19, RG 69, NA. Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem in American Democracy (New York, 1944), 1337.Google Scholar

32. Woofter personnel file, NPRC. “Dr Woofter Research Director Federal Security Agency,” Population Index 7 (January 1941), 13. “USFSA” is used here to avoid confusion with the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The bureau heads were all political appointees.

33. Cuellar, Mariano-Florentino, “‘Securing’ the Nation: Law, Politics, and Organization at the Federal Security Agency, 1939–1953,” University of Chicago Law Review 76 (Spring 2009): 587–718Google Scholar. Louis Levine to Jack Woofter, 9 November 1948, file 025, box 55, RG 235, Records of the Federal Security Agency, in Records of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, NA. In 1938, President Roosevelt  proposed a Department of Public Welfare, but Congress objected; hence the creation of the Federal Security Agency under the Reorganization Act of 1939. Polenberg, Richard, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government: The Controversy over Executive Reorganization, 1936–1939 (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 146–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Biological weapons research was undertaken by the USFSA’s secret bureau, the War Research Services.

34. Lewis Hershey to T. J. Woofter, 6 March 1946, file 200.1, box 166, RG 235, NA.

35. Woofter, T. J. Jr., Community Problems in Defense Areas (Chicago, 1941)Google Scholar. House Committee on Census, 77th Congress, Authorizing the Director of the Census to Issue Birth Certificates, 10 June 1942, 65–73. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, 77th Congress, Documentary Evidence of Citizenship, 11, 12, 17 February 1942, 27–30. Senate Committee on Commerce, 78th Congress, Establishing a Bureau of Vital Records in the U.S. Public Health Service, 13 January 1944, 24–26.

36. Security, Work, and Relief Policies (Washington, DC, 1942). Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, MA), 8 October 1942, 5; Chicago Tribune, 11 December 1942, 2; New York Times, 11 March 1943, 1, 13; Pittsburgh Press, 11 March 1943, 9; Oakland Tribune, 11 March 1943, 16; New York Times, 31 July 1943, 1. Cincinnati Enquirer, 14 March 1943, 5. Altmeyer, Arthur J., The Formative Years of Social Security (Madison, 1966), 143–51.Google ScholarBeveridge, W. H., Social Insurance and Allied Services (London, 1942)Google Scholar. See also Derthick, Martha, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, DC, 1979)Google Scholar. On NRPB, see Merriam, Charles E., “The National Resources Planning Board: A Chapter in American Planning Experience,” American Political Science Review 38 (December 1944): 1075–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the contrasts in social sciences growth in the US and Britain, and the differing relationships between academe and public policy, see Bulmer, Martin, “National Contexts for the Development of Social-Policy Research: British and American Research on Poverty and Social Welfare Compared,” in Wagner, Peter et al., eds., Social Sciences and Modern States: National Experiences and Theoretical Crossroads (Cambridge, 1991), 148–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wittrock, Björn and Wagner, Peter, “Social Science and the Building of the Early Welfare State: Toward a Comparison of Statist and Non-Statist Western Societies,” in Rueschemeyer, Dietrich and Skocpol, Theda, eds., States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies (Princeton, 1996), 90–113Google Scholar; Libby Schweber, “Progressive Reformers, Unemployment, and the Transformation of Social Inquiry in Britain and the United States, 1880s–1920s,” in Rueschemeyer and Skocpol, 163–200.

37. Loucheim, Katie, ed., The Making of the New Deal: The Insiders Speak (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 157–58Google Scholar. Although federal Social Security was widened, more was paid out by the states’ worker compensation schemes and veterans’ programs. Berkowitz, Edward, “Social Welfare and the American State,” in Critchlow, Donald T. and Hawley, Ellis W., eds., Federal Social Policy: The Historical Dimension (University Park, PA, 1988), 172–73.Google Scholar

38. Woofter, T. J. Jr., “Preliminary Population Estimates Based on Ration Book Applications,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 37 (December 1942): 437–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Woofter, “A Method of Analysis of Family Composition and Income,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 39 (December 1944): 488–96; Woofter, “Size of Family in Relation to Family Income and Age of Family Head,” American Sociological Review 9 (December 1944), 678–84; T. J. Woofter, “Southern Children and Family Security,” Social Forces 23 (March 1945), 366–75, and reprinted in Odum, Howard W. and Jocher, Katharine, eds., In Search of the Regional Balance of America (Chapel Hill, 1945), 124–33.Google Scholar

39. Wolfenden, Hugh H., Population Statistics and Their Compilation (Chicago, 1954), 225Google Scholar. Woofter to Gordon Blackwell, 25 September 1945; Woofter to Martin Marimont, 6 January 1945; Woofter to A. J. Lotka, 14 June 1945 (this letter was 3,000 words long); and Woofter to Franklin Frazier, 5 April 1946, all in file 052, box 130, RG 235, NA. Howard University was administered by the USFSA. Recent research notes the obstacles to gaining certain kinds of work in the South for African Americans in the 1940s, but it suggests that racial wage differentials themselves were not large. See Celeste K. Carruthers and Marianne H. Wanamaker, “Separate and Unequal in the Labor Market: Human Capital and the Jim Crow Wage Gap,” Working Paper 21947 (National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2016), 51pp. T. J. Woofter, “Children and Family Income,” Social Security Bulletin 8 (January 1945): 1–6; Woofter, “Children and Family Security,” Social Security Bulletin 8 (March 1945): 5–10; Woofter, “Probabilities of Death in Closed Population Groups, Illustrated by Probabilities of Death of White Fathers after Birth of Children,” Human Biology 18 (September 1946): 158–70. See also Frank W. Notestein, “Demography in the United States: A Partial Account of the Development of the Field,” Population and Development Review 8 (December 1982): 651–87. Dublin and Lotka worked for Metropolitan Life insurance company.

40. Woofter, T. J. Jr., “Interpolation for Populations Whose Rate of Increase Is Declining,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 27 (June 1932): 180–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Dunkirk (NY) Evening Observer, 16 May 1939, 13. See, for example, T. J. Woofter, Jr., “What Is the Negro Rate of Increase?” Journal of the American Statistical Association 26 (December 1931): 461–62. Woofter, “Southern Population and Social Planning,” Social Forces 14 (October 1935): 609–18. Woofter, “The Natural Increase of the Rural Non–Farm Population,” Milbank Quarterly 13 (December 1935): 311–19. Woofter, “Replacement Rates in the Productive Ages,” Milbank Quarterly 15 (December 1937): 438–54. Woofter, “The Future Working Population,” Rural Sociology 4 (September 1939): 275–82.

42. Gazette and Daily (York, PA), 9 August 1937, 3. Intermittent conferences followed the 1927 World Population Conference in Geneva, chaired by Margaret Sanger under League of Nations auspices (the culmination of six international birth-control conferences). At the Paris Conference, where population collapse due to falling fertility was predicted, proposals for  German and Italian participation led to boycotts. Schoen, Coercion and Choice, 198. New York Times, 30 July 1937, 4. Woofter to Hopkins, 25 June 1937, folder 27, box 54, Harry L. Hopkins Papers, Special Collections Division, Georgetown University.

43. Dunkirk Evening Observer, 16 May 1939, 13; Harrisburg (PA) Evening News, 27 December 1939, 1; Gazette and Daily, 29 December 1937, 6. Woofter advised the Children’s Bureau’s White House Conference on Children in a Democracy in January 1940. See Proceedings … [Bureau Publication No. 266] (Washington, DC, 1940).

44. Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin, 13 March 1940, 25; Newport News Daily Press, 16 April 1940, 12. Edmund Ramsden, “Social Demography and Eugenics in the Interwar United States,” Population and Development Review 29 (December 2003): 547–93. “Association Cooperates in Radio Series,” Population Index 6 (October 1940): 255–56. Woofter also sat on the Rural Sociological Society executive with Carl C. Taylor of USDA and Dwight Sanderson of Cornell University, and joined Taylor as an incorporator of the American Sociological Society (later, Association) in 1943. Lawrence J. Rhoades, A History of the American Sociological Association, 1905–1980 (1981) at http://www.asanet.org.

45. Medford (OR) Mail Tribune, 22 June 1944, 8. Hoff, Derek S., The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in U.S. History (Chicago, 2012), 11–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the baby boom, see Bouk, Dan, “Generation Crisis: How Population Research Defined the Baby Boomers,” Modern American History 1 (November 2018): 321–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hosen, Frederick E., The Great Depression and the New Deal (Jefferson, NC, 1992), 250–55.Google Scholar

46. Shyrock, Henry S., Siegel, Jacob S., et al., The Methods and Materials of Demography, Volume 2 (Washington, DC, 1973), 537–39Google Scholar. T. J. Woofter, “Completed Generation Reproduction Rates,” Human Biology 19 (September 1947): 133–53; Woofter, “The Relation of the Net Reproduction Rate to Other Fertility Measures,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 44 (December 1949): 501–17. Jean van der Tak, Arthur Campbell interview, 16 February 1988, Demographic Destinies 1/2 (2005): 285. See also Whelpton, P. K., “Cohort Analysis of Fertility,” American Sociological Review 14 (December 1949): 735–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Woofter’s cohort studies led to disagreements with Lotka, one of the founders of mathematical demography. Louis Henry, “L’assemblée de l’Union internationale pour l’étude scientifique de la population,” Population 4 (October–December 1949): 749–51. The insurance industry, for which Lotka worked, was opposed to the accumulation of large Social Security funds.

47. T. J. Woofter, “Factors Sustaining the Birth Rate,” American Sociological Review 14 (June 1949): 357–66. New York Times, 17 July 1949, E10.

48. T. J. Woofter to Albert J. Engel, 22 March 1945, file 052, box 130; Watson Miller to Dean Acheson, 21 May 1946, file 241.3, box 197; H. A. Wallace to Miller, file 320, box 244; Woofter to L. Moss, 3 April 1945, file 520, box 83; Oscar Ewing to Miller, 25 March 1948, file 201, box 178, all in RG 235, NA. T. J. Woofter, “Saving the Lives of Good Neighbors,” American Sociological Review 12 (August 1947): 420–23.

49. Woofter to Agency Research Committee, 31 December 1947, file 025, box 55, RG 235.

50. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, 3rd ed. (New Haven, 2003), 59–60.

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.

53. Desch, Michael C., Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton, 2019), 89, 96–101.Google Scholar

54. On the growth of the international population movement, see Matthew Connolly, “Seeing Beyond the State: The Population Control Movement and the Problem of Sovereignty,” Past and Present 193 (November 2006): 197–233, and Emily Klancher Merchant, “A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984,” Population and Development Review 43 (March 2017): 83–117.

55. Jeffreys-Jones, CIA and American Democracy, 39–41.

56. Walter E. Todd to Director, Central Intelligence, 25 September 1947, CIA-RDP79-01143A000400010023-3, General CIA Records, CIA Library (CL), https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/general-cia-records. Thomas B. Inglis to Director, Central Intelligence, 31 October 1947, CIA-RDP79—01143A000400010017-0, CL.

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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