Demography in the United States: A Partial Account of the Development of the Field

A full account of the development of population studies in the United States is needed, but that is not the purpose of this undertaking. Its purpose is to tease out from part of that story several threads of activity by people and organizations that helped establish the field. As one who has grown up with the field and been involved in parts of the activity and planning, as both a foundation and a university man, I feel competent to tell the story about those parts. If I were to treat elements of the story with which I've been less intimately connected, I would risk a very uneven account. So this undertakes to be the story of the development of that part of American demography with which I have been most involved.' I should also note the peculiarities of our field before discussing the ways in which decisions have been made. Demography has two main foci, one in the biological sciences, and the other in the social sciences. In neither case does the core material that is unique to the study of human population represent any substantial proportion of the scientific field. The biologists are generally geneticists, physiologists, or ecologists. The social scientists are generally sociologists, economists, statisticians, and occasionally anthropologists, psychologists, or political scientists. Since the major part of our scientific equipment lies in our background professions, all of us tend to come to the subject with the modes of thought, orientation, and prejudices of our background disciplines. Geneticists and ecologists are concerned with systems that are not uniquely human and are often subject to experimental manipulation. Because they try to understand and foster systems, they tend to be relatively less concerned about the individuals that comprise populations and tend to carry this attitude over to their thinking about humans. The social scientists, being concerned with the systems of human interrelationships, tend to concentrate on the ways in which humans can use nature, not just live on equal terms with it. Save