I

Born in 1893 and raised in Athens, Georgia, Woofter earned his BA degree from the University of Georgia at the age of nineteen; after a year of graduate study, he spent fifteen years as a researcher, organizer, publicist, and antilynching activist for the southern interracial cooperation movement, interrupted by two years as a military statistician in the American Expeditionary Force’s headquarters and his ground-breaking PhD at Columbia University on black migration. This immersion in wartime planning and rural demographic projection fostered in Woofter a lasting faith in the power of skillfully presented quantitative data. In 1927, he left the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) in Atlanta to join Howard W. Odum’s Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. With his salary and research initially funded by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, he studied African American demographics and urban conditions, the “evils attending the farm tenant system and conditions in the courts,” life on the sea islands, and subregional agricultural challenges, such as those faced by tobacco growers.Footnote ⁴

At UNC, he produced a report for President Herbert Hoover’s commission on African Americans in the US economy and was criticized by W. E. B. Du Bois for placing insufficient weight on racial discrimination. He also contributed a sociological study, “The Status of Racial and Ethnic Groups,” to Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends. In 1933, Odum commended Woofter to Tennessee Valley Authority Director Arthur E. Morgan as “a very genuine spirit as well as a good social statistician,” which led to a series of impact studies.Footnote ⁵ Woofter also improved Odum’s regional model for southern studies. Claiming there were “many Souths,” he ignored state boundaries, dividing 976 southeastern counties into twenty-seven seemingly homogenous clusters—the smallest with four counties, the largest with 122—believing that social and cultural bonds grew from shared geography. Using labels such as “Mining,” “Red River,” “Blue Grass,” “Northern Piedmont,” and “Semi-Tropical,” he highlighted local rates of literacy, tenancy, employment, and the ownership of telephones and cars, along with land values and racial composition, and claimed that his groupings assisted “practical planning of social programs [and] research into the characteristics of the region.” Decades later, his work was still used by social scientists.Footnote ⁶

During the early 1930s, like other rural sociologists and economists in the South and West, Jack Woofter studied distressed communities and rural relief programs (in 1934, 1.7 million families were dependent on relief). He was critical of the conflicting agendas and methods of the agencies attempting to help farmers in the first two years of the New Deal; nevertheless, in March 1935, he agreed to a temporary transfer to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and eventually chose to remain in what he called “the mad house which is Washington” until he retired.Footnote ⁷

Woofter worked on sharecropping in the Rural Unit of the FERA’s Research Section and in September 1935 became Coordinator of Rural Research. He oversaw the work of rural social workers and state research supervisors in the thirty-one cooperating states and collaborated with sociologists in the long-established Division of Farm Population and Rural Life (DFPRL), part of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE), led by Carl C. Taylor. According to its historians, DFPRL had been “literally left out of the action during the First Agrarian New Deal,” when an array of new schemes was launched in response to the farm crisis.Footnote ⁸ Woofter saw the South as the main problem, but his FERA remit was national; in 1935, he chaired conferences of FERA officials from eight western states in Salt Lake City and met supervisors from nine western drought states in Omaha. One of his first steps was to improve methods for collecting and sharing data on relief applicants, employable recipients, rural women, African American youth, “stranded village and small town communities,” education, and drought.Footnote ⁹

In May 1935, the Resettlement Administration was formed as the New Deal developed longer-term strategies; by December, emergency grants had ended and the FERA was replaced by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), providing work for unemployed adults, and by the Social Security Board, delivering assistance and insurance under the Social Security Act. Woofter transferred to the WPA as its principal agricultural economist and chief of Rural Surveys, supervising studies of rural life and distributing funds to state colleges. He also devised methods for calculating accurately the number of citizens and households receiving relief or emergency employment, showing this peaking at 27.5 million people in 7.8 million households during the winter of 1933–34, and settling at 17 million people in 5.5 million households in 1938.Footnote ¹⁰

In all, Woofter oversaw production of fourteen substantial government studies, writing several himself, including Landlord and Tenant on the Cotton Plantation (1936) and a follow-up, The Plantation South, 1934–1937 (1940). Described as “one of the classics on the subject,” Landlord and Tenant on the Cotton Plantation was part of an outpouring of academic, official, literary, photographic, cinematic, and journalistic work on American farm tenancy and its place in the wider depression.Footnote ¹¹ Starting in June 1935, Woofter led a team of local enumerators and DFPRL sociologists in detailed surveys of 646 plantations, punch-carding 4,500 tenants’ schedules for the 1934 crop year and creating an unprecedented picture of plantation life, finances, land tenure, education, mobility, housing, and health in seven cotton growing southeastern states. Only half the tenants in the South worked in a cotton plantation setting, but Woofter insisted that persistent “plantation customs and ideology set the pattern for relationships … , and the plantation stands out as the basis for a hereditary oligarchy in southern community life.” Chronic poverty, low prices, constant debt, recurrent sickness, incompetent land ownership, and soil erosion were found everywhere, with African American tenants experiencing the worst conditions.Footnote ¹² The report, with 170 figures and tables, was not formally transmitted by the WPA until the end of 1936, but in the summer of 1935 the press got wind of it, resulting in reports that “Woofter’s private opinion” was that the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA)’s controversial acreage reduction schemes had made conditions worse for tenants and croppers, increasing their eviction rate and boosting the incomes of landlords.Footnote ¹³ This attack on a flagship program of the first New Deal ensured that Woofter’s study attracted wide attention and contributed to a surge in public and congressional sympathy toward impoverished tenants; the press also picked up on Woofter’s view that there were no easy, short-term solutions to the tenancy problem and his implied skepticism about the recently introduced Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant bill. (The Bankhead-Jones bill, authorizing the federal government to take over and restore damaged land on behalf of tenants, was finally enacted in June 1937, when the Resettlement Administration’s projects were absorbed by the Department of Agriculture’s new Farm Security Administration.)Footnote ¹⁴

The director of the WPA, Harry Hopkins, saw Woofter’s report as a useful stick with which to beat the AAA and its cautious administrator, Chester C. Davis. This divide between the AAA and the WPA’s anti-elitist approach was aired publicly at an ill-tempered convention of fifty rural sociologists and other experts hosted by Howard Odum at Chapel Hill in June 1936. The South, they agreed, was at “a new crossroads of crisis.” Addressing the convention, Woofter expressed frustration at disjointed federal farm policies that rewarded landowners and rural businesses and prioritized highways and dams over education. He called for a “national educational plan … and revitalization of the educational system from the kindergarten to the university,” and issued a warning: “This accumulation of a great mass of rural population with limited cultural opportunities creates a hotbed of smoldering discontent which at any instant can break out into revolt against the status quo.” Another rural sociologist on secondment to Washington, Barnett Osborne Williams of Clemson Agricultural College, accused the government of neglecting “the human factors” in attempting to fix rural America—he had spoken to Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace about the plight of the farm family “and got no response from him. I argued the importance of the sociological approach, but he thought it would not be scientific. I told him you could work from the people to the land or from the land to the people. But he could be neither convinced nor interested.” These outbursts at Chapel Hill by government officials appeared verbatim in the press.Footnote ¹⁵

During 1938–39, Woofter cowrote The Plantation South, 1934–1937, assessing the impact of the depression and the effectiveness of consequent New Deal measures. During the high-yielding 1937 crop year, he instructed his state supervisors to repeat the 1934 surveys in 246 of the original plantations and found that over the previous three years planters had increased their landholdings, work animals, cultivated acreage, and yields per acre (especially of cotton), all of which ran counter to the AAA’s policy of preventing overproduction to sustain farm prices. There were now fewer renters and croppers and more laborers. Planters’ debts were down and their net incomes were up, whereas tenants’ average cash income increases (up from $263 in 1934 to $300 in 1937) had been wiped out by their new debts. Winter hardship was compounded by substandard diets, housing, and health care, while the WPA’s work programs offered too few jobs for the underemployed. The President’s Committee on Farm Tenancy, chaired by Wallace, had endorsed the Bankhead–Jones proposals for reducing permanent and dependent tenancy, requiring proper leases, and helping resourceful tenants to become landowners, but these gradualist policies were still unimplemented. Clearly, Woofter concluded, “Much remains to be done.”Footnote ¹⁶

The implicit radicalism of Landlord and Tenant and The Plantation South was fully embraced by the WPA and in the summer of 1938, at Hopkins’s suggestion, Woofter popularized their message by writing Seven Lean Years (1939) with Ellen Black Winston, a North Carolinian junior member of the WPA’s Division of Research. Unlike Woofter’s official publications, which were put out by the U.S. Government Printing Office, Seven Lean Years was published by the University of North Carolina Press and aimed at a white general audience. Hopkins saw it as useful propaganda for rural relief and an opportunity to contrast the Roosevelt and Hoover administrations. The book was an ominous “national analysis” of farm life from 1931 to 1937, during which the FERA, the Resettlement Administration, and the WPA had spent $3.5 billion in attempting to relieve distress in rural communities, and the USDA spent a further $10 billion on price-fixing and direct grants.Footnote ¹⁷

By synthesizing the findings of the FERA and WPA research divisions, Woofter and Winston intended to offer “a nontechnical summary of the fundamental aspects of maladjustment in rural areas and outline methods for the reconstruction of rural life which should prevent the recurrence of needless distress.” Instead of an agronomical survey, they declared, Seven Lean Years would take a “humanitarian” look at extreme rural poverty without “sentimentalism and political claptrap,” but it was nevertheless the most polemical thing Woofter ever wrote. The authors set out their “abiding conviction that it is important to the national welfare that positive programs of agrarian and social reform be vigorously pursued.” They called for permanently raised living standards through “very fundamental planning” and programs that would have benefited farming long before the depression.Footnote ¹⁸ They chose sixteen WPA photographs to contrast the bleakness of “Displaced Tenants,” “A Large Relief Family on Poor Land,” tented migrant camps, soil erosion, and dust storms, with optimistic images of rural schools and clinics, smiling young laborers on federal projects, a “Rehabilitated” farmer with hog carcasses in his well-stocked storeroom, and “The Millionth WPA Pupil” studying farming methods.

All the photographs and almost all the family case histories included were of white people, despite the desperate situation of millions of rural African Americans. Revealingly, the book’s longest reference to black farmers was taken from a study Woofter had published a decade earlier about a South Carolina sea island.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1935, southern black sharecroppers on direct relief received the lowest monthly payments of all groups under the FERA principle of “budgetary deficiency”—just $4 per household—while the one-in-five white farm owners relying on work relief in the Great Lakes cut-over area received $27 a month. Woofter and Winston skated over this with the comment that in 1933 payments had been even lower and stated, “The adequacy of relief grants was in large measure determined by the administrative policies in the various states and by the amount of funds available.”Footnote ²⁰ They were both liberal white southerners, but they complied with the racist orthodoxy as to whose misery mattered most. Historian Eileen Boris attributes this relentless stress on the white family not so much to the authors’ bias as to “a reform strategy to give poverty a white face” in view of the Democratic Party’s dominance in the South and its disproportionate power in congressional committees and presidential elections.Footnote ²¹

Woofter and Winston saw the “drama of the depression” as a chance to give lasting assistance to poor people who were hammered by low farm prices, drought, and public assistance cutbacks in 1937 but would gain nothing from the Social Security Act or New Deal hours and wages regulations. The sorry story of rural insecurity was all too familiar: once-successful families were now marooned by single crop production and irreparable erosion, low incomes, minimal savings, precarious tenancy, mounting taxes, debts, and foreclosures. Communities of small farms and towns were finally “submerged” when markets shrank, credit evaporated, machines began to displace labor, and cash incomes from rural construction, mining, or logging vanished (just one in eight farm laborers found employment in 1935 that did not derive from a government program).Footnote ²²

Tenants, especially young sharecroppers raising cotton or tobacco, were so trapped by debt and short leases that even a good yield might make little difference. Americans might not like the term “peasant,” Woofter and Winston observed, but it aptly described many citizens. They calculated that the incomes of five million farm families were below minimum urban subsistence levels and three million lived in complete poverty. Farm owners were not immune: the margins between success and failure were so narrow that half the five hundred thousand farm families on the FERA’s emergency relief rolls in 1935 were owners facing heavy debts, drought, or ill-health. Rural youth transience, inadequate schooling and training, poor health, diets, and sanitation led Woofter and Winston to warn that “the depression will leave a lasting imprint on the next generation,” unless the wealthy contributed more.Footnote ²³ The most “chronically underprivileged” families were found where the boll weevil struck cotton growers after 1910 and in the “Appalachian-Ozark, Lake States Cut-Over, Spring Wheat, and Winter Wheat” regions. Texas and Oklahoma also suffered high transport costs and droughts in 1934 and 1936, and southern mountain regions from West Virginia to Arkansas battled eroded hillsides, deforestation, poor roads, and low literacy. Woofter and Winston concluded that, despite the recent efforts of the FERA Rehabilitation Program, the Resettlement Administration, the Soil Conservation Service, the Red Cross, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, millions of farm families faced a permanent dependence on relief.Footnote ²⁴

They therefore appealed for long-term policies to prevent distress. They proposed large-scale flexible rehabilitation loans, supported by FSA land-use and home economics experts, and permanent public works programs to resettle all “relief farmers [in a] … regionally balanced agriculture.” Acreage control, they argued, could cut commercial production as part of long-range planning, but not as a quick fix. Surplus food should be distributed cheaply or free, as in Sweden, “especially when the poorer classes are rearing the future population,” while cooperatives would prevent deflationary surpluses and spread income equitably. They also called for a “population policy” to encourage “heavy migration” away from farms in drought-hit and cotton regions and envisaged an ideal mixture of farming, decentralized industry, and housebuilding to create employment. Finally, an attractive credit system, appropriate education, and new public health services would transform rural life.Footnote ²⁵

They called on Congress to pay for this vision by using “the broader tax base of the whole nation.” States with the biggest rural problems could never afford the required investment; their low tax returns meant they struggled just to match federal spending on unemployables, the aged, and children under the Social Security program. Woofter and Winston declared: “It is self-evident that if national standards of security and public welfare are to continue to advance, increasing participation of the national government in equalizing state finances is necessary.” Only then would a massive enlargement of essential services create jobs and give rural America the same standards as the cities: “If a reasonable amount of foresight is exercised, American agriculture can be prevented from declining to the point where American farmers are forced to a peasant standard of living. However, if with the return of normal prosperity the rural sore spots are forgotten, they may be counted upon to pile up a staggering relief bill again whenever the national economy is thrown out seriously out of balance.”Footnote ²⁶

The first New Deal had tried to maintain industrial workers’ incomes and the demand for agricultural output, in the hope that farm families’ purchasing power would alleviate the depression. The policy had failed, and relieving rural distress now offered limited gains: “A long-range plan of attack not subject to emergency psychology should be the goal.” Basically, the farmer’s problems predated the slump—and the government needed to rehabilitate the victims of “the pioneering and the exploitative” stages of American agriculture. Woofter and Winston rounded off with a unifying New Deal flourish: “The future welfare of America is at stake, and inextricably bound up with the welfare of rural areas…. The nation cannot be permanently prosperous unless it rests on the solid foundation of a prospering rural population.”Footnote ²⁷

Perhaps Seven Lean Years is best understood as an expression of what sociohistorian Jess Gilbert has referred to as the “Intended New Deal.” Certainly, in 1938, a new momentum was needed if radical interagency collaboration was to help the rural disadvantaged. The United Farm Program and the Rural Life Trends Project sparked some interest in Congress in the work of the BAE and the Farm Security Administration (FSA), while Woofter and Winston were attempting what Gilbert calls an agrarian dialogue “between expert and citizen,” but by now the energy of the New Deal was drained.Footnote ²⁸

In July 1939, amid a broad government reorganization, Woofter moved to the FSA, becoming chief economist and adviser to its administrator, Will Alexander, formerly head of the Resettlement Administration. During the 1920s, Woofter was one of Alexander’s closest colleagues in the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta and his FSA appointment was typical of Alexander’s personal approach to filling senior positions. (A year later, in July 1940, Alexander departed for the National Defense Commission and the Rosenwald Fund, and was succeeded by C. B. Baldwin, an equally liberal Wallace associate.)Footnote ²⁹ Woofter appeared with Alexander before the civil liberties subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, arguing for proper rehabilitation for farm families to limit wasteful migration, and seeking new tenancy reforms and access to public works for all rural Americans.Footnote ³⁰ He began work on a celebration of a decade of rural rehabilitation, but the FSA—described by historian Otis L. Graham Jr. as “an odd combination of the anachronistic and the visionary”—was already faltering. Under Alexander and Baldwin, it remained an enclave of New Deal humanitarianism toward small farmers, including African Americans, but its resources lagged behind its practical democratic ambitions and its ability to aid tenants was limited. Undaunted, and despite inherent financial and jurisdictional obstacles, and growing antagonism toward the FSA in Congress, Woofter called again for a policy of reducing the surplus farm population and taking submarginal farmland out of cultivation to combat malnutrition and disease.Footnote ³¹ These things were delivered, to a degree, less by the New Deal than by American entry into World War II.

II

In December 1940, Woofter resigned from the FSA to become research director of the new U.S. Federal Security Agency (USFSA). This agency, which became the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953, played a crucial role in policy transitions from New Deal to wartime and from war to peacetime. It worked closely with the states and was the core vehicle for planning and delivering Social Security and public services during the 1940s. As one of its most senior appointees, Woofter advised the USFSA administrator, former Indiana governor Paul V. McNutt. He also directed a swathe of social science research across sixteen bureaus, including the Social Security Board, Office of Education, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, the Children’s Bureau, the Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Public Health Service. His own research generated advanced methods for projecting demographic shifts and Social Security budget requirements.Footnote ³²

In a critical evaluation of the USFSA, Mariano-Florentino Cuellar notes that its wartime remit also included “civil defense preparedness, supplying employees to war-related industries, facilitating the relocation of Japanese-Americans, antiprostitution enforcement, and biological weapons research.” This controversial centralization of executive power included domestic regulatory and national defense functions that would continue after the war, leading USFSA officials to assert “the contribution made by research and statistics to national security.”Footnote ³³ In 1941–42, after McNutt assumed chairmanship of the War Manpower Commission, Woofter provided data and analysis for the Selective Service System.Footnote ³⁴ He also addressed the National Conference of Social Work on pressures caused by the sudden migration of workers to towns with defense plants and he appeared repeatedly before congressional committees to explain the chaos caused in several states by people with no supporting documents rushing for birth certificates after the 1941 War Act barred companies with government contracts from hiring aliens.Footnote ³⁵

In 1942–43, the government launched a series of planning activities for the postwar period, led by the Board of Economic Warfare, the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), and the Federal Reserve. Woofter headed the USFSA’s response through a program planning committee tasked with expanding Social Security, education, and health services. Promising to work through state and local agencies, he called for “getting planning down as close to Main Street as you can get it.” He also represented the agency on the NRPB’s special Committee on Long-Range Work and Relief Policies, with New Deal veterans Will Alexander, Katharine F. Lenroot of the Children’s Bureau, and Corrington C. Gill of the Office of Civil Defense. Their 550-page “social revolution” report, “Security, Work, and Relief Polices,” was sent to the White House in December 1941 (a year before the publication of Sir William Beveridge’s plan for postwar Britain, Social Insurance and Allied Services), but Roosevelt delayed providing it to Congress until March 1943, when its Beveridge-ish “cradle to the grave” welfare proposals were promptly attacked as “socialistic.” (The 1943 and 1945 Wagner-Murray-Dingell bills, inspired by this NRPB report, were blocked by the American Medical Association.) The report was followed in July 1943 by the NRPB’s demobilization proposals, prepared by the Conference on Post-War Readjustment of Civilian and Military Personnel, on which Woofter again represented the USFSA. The demobilization report, one of the last things the board produced before it was abolished by Congress, was attacked by the Republican Party as “a bold bid for the vote of our soldiers and sailors.” Nevertheless, NRPB analyses contributed to the design and passage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (G.I. Bill) in 1944.Footnote ³⁶

One of Woofter’s main wartime contributions was nailing down the postwar costs of amendments made in 1939 to the original Social Security Act (although he did not suggest how those costs might be met or contained). As Wilbur J. Cohen, one of those responsible for the changes, put it, they “transformed it from just an old-age insurance program to an old-age and survivors’ insurance program.”Footnote ³⁷ In response to new provisions covering workers’ widows and dependants, the Social Security Board tried to predict future survivors’ benefits and maintenance budgets, while allowing for racial and regional income disparities, variable family composition, and postwar disability rates.Footnote ³⁸ Woofter used North Carolina as a test-bed for the effects of this expansion of postwar social security provision. He also consulted with the leading African American sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier of Howard University, on black family income levels and exchanged detailed correspondence with prominent American demographers and actuaries Frank Lorimer, P. K. Whelpton, Louis I. Dublin, and Alfred J. Lotka, concerning methods for estimating the number of paternal orphans over five-yearly intervals—“a problem of very practical significance.” As summarized in Hugh Wolfenden’s Population Statistics and Their Compilation, Woofter’s calculations “were made by taking the number of births by age of father in each of the preceding 18 years, applying the death rates of fathers by age to determine the number of deaths among fathers, and using survival rates of children to compute the number of orphans surviving to the specified year.”Footnote ³⁹ Woofter, who began work on population statistics at UNC, saw this as the best way round the problem of predicting future patterns when the only firm yardstick was the decennial census.Footnote ⁴⁰

Throughout the New Deal he had commented on demographic issues with increasing urgency and authority, and was referred to in the press as “the WPA’s population expert.”Footnote ⁴¹ Hopkins approved Woofter’s participation in the 1937 International Congress on Population Problems in Paris, where his presentation emphasized “the human elements that press for attention on the part of those guiding the nation’s destiny.” He complained that the United States lacked a “clear-cut policy [for] population planning” and urged “further research, exact and detailed knowledge” concerning annual increases in young job seekers, low urban birth rates, migration back to the poorest land, and the projected increase in old people from 6.6 million in 1930 to 14.2 million by 1960.Footnote ⁴² He told a joint meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA) and the American Sociological Society in 1939 that, although employment had reached 1930 levels (i.e., 35 million), unemployment had doubled to 11 million because a million young people reached working age annually. This required the USA to create 19.5 million jobs over the next two decades. He saw little point in trying to limit population growth through birth control and immigration restriction because falling birth rates would produce an eventual rise in the average age of the population. Instead, in statements that echoed his work on agriculture, he pointed to demographic projections showing the need for a “long-range public employment program [and a] different distribution of income—an increase in the purchasing power of the lower third of the population.”Footnote ⁴³ He repeated these radical warnings in 1940, when he became PAA president and joined other leading demographers, such as Whelpton, Lorimer, William F. Ogburn, and Rupert B. Vance, in advising individual state planning boards and giving radio talks for the PAA. Although Woofter collaborated with midcentury American social demographers who advanced theories concerning the cause and effects of population change, he did not share the enthusiasm of some of them for social eugenics, and as PAA president he helped distance the association from its eugenicist, birth control, and nativist origins.Footnote ⁴⁴

In the aftermath of depression and war, no government could enhance the welfare system and maintain national security without effective statistical forecasting concerning manpower and fertility. In 1944, Woofter and the Census Bureau noted continuing concerns that American birth rates, especially in cities, might not replace the existing population and labor force, even if the already-evident baby boom persisted. This was part of an old debate about the optimum size of the American population, in which long-term stability was increasingly seen as the best outcome.Footnote ⁴⁵ During and after World War II, Woofter refined American reproductivity measurements, by focusing less on the number of births for any given year, and more on the fertility and mortality of a given cohort of women. By comparing reproductivity of women aged 15 to 44 in 1944 with female mortality rates since 1915, he arrived at a “generation net reproductive rate.” This differed from conventional methods and showed the reproduction rates between 1923 and 1938 of American women born between 1895 and 1910 falling less fast than other studies; Woofter’s approach would be taken forward by Whelpton.Footnote ⁴⁶

At the end of the 1940s, Woofter commented on the number of demographers, including himself, who had wrongly predicted that fertility and populations would continue to decline in industrial societies. He now attributed falling birth rates in the 1930s and rising rates in the 1940s to economic fluctuations: during and after the war higher incomes made having children more affordable and the effect of better living standards was to slash rates of sterility, infant mortality, and prenatal death; for example, the death rates of five-year-old girls and middle-aged women were half those of 1900.Footnote ⁴⁷ In other words, prospects for rural and urban family formation and stability were transformed between 1940 and 1950.

Woofter proved extraordinarily useful and adaptable in employing his demographic expertise to assist planners and decisionmakers; he headed up groups on new policy matters and represented the federal security administrator on interdepartmental bodies, such as the Presidential Research Board. He also advised Commerce Secretary Henry A. Wallace on transferring the Vital Statistics Division from the Census to the U.S. Public Health Service, supplied welfare data to Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson for debates in the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, helped the Justice Department’s review of immigration policy, and regularly briefed members of Congress. He also tracked international developments, comparing notes on family composition and income with Louis Moss, director of the British Wartime Social Survey which was co-opted by the Ministry of Information, and monitored South American attempts to boost postwar immigration.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1946, another major federal reorganization saw the USFSA expanded and the start of a complete re-examination of government research needs. For two years, Woofter led a comprehensive review that detailed 122 ongoing research projects, 52 planned projects, and 55 evaluations across the four USFSA subagencies—Public Health Service, Social Security Administration, Office of Education, and Office of Special Services—showing the new reliance by the federal and state governments on trained social scientists for the appraisal of Fair Deal policy decisions affecting every citizen, and the beginnings of a data revolution unthinkable during the Coolidge era just two decades earlier.Footnote ⁴⁹

III

In the summer of 1949, President Truman signed the Central Intelligence Agency Act, giving the CIA more money and freedom, and reorganizing the agency in ways that enabled the poaching of specialists from across the federal government to improve gathering and analysis of data.Footnote ⁵⁰ In September 1949, having transformed research and project management in the Federal Security Agency, Jack Woofter moved from work dominated by public welfare to national security. He joined the CIA as chief of the Labor and Manpower (later, Population and Labor) Branch of the Economic Services Division in the Office of Research and Reports. He was hired for his skill as a research director, sociologist, and demographer, and especially his techniques for forecasting population and manpower trends, as intelligence chiefs looked for improved data on America’s adversaries.Footnote ⁵¹ The hiring of division and branch chiefs with academic credentials was not uncommon; hence Woofter’s recruitment for intelligence work, traceable through impersonal, declassified, and partially redacted CIA documents.Footnote ⁵²

After World War II, as Michael Desch shows in Cult of the Irrelevant, the armed services took note of social science research and during the Cold War most government departments used social scientists in organizational and strategic planning. Desch argues that at the same time many social scientists perceived a choice between “rigor and relevance,” the implication being that universities were strongholds of “rigor,” whereas academics who sought “relevance” opted for government work.Footnote ⁵³ Many of those who did important studies for the government during the war, such as the psychologist Rensis Likert and the sociologist Samuel Stouffer, returned to university-based research in 1946. As a civil servant, Woofter tried to exhibit both rigor and relevance, working on population and competitive manpower assessments for strategic defense purposes, whilst maintaining his association with scholars like Stouffer through the PAA and the American Statistical Association. He nevertheless became detached from some of the debates over population control that preoccupied internationalist American demographers such as Notestein and Lorimer (although their work on wartime Europe and “emerging nations” had Cold War relevance).Footnote ⁵⁴

In 1947, Congress enlarged budgets and research staffing for intelligence work through the National Security Act, giving the CIA analytical functions and a military-civilian leadership intended to reduce interdepartmental rivalry.Footnote ⁵⁵ Dissatisfaction and tensions surrounding demographic intelligence were clear: Deputy Director of Military Intelligence Gen. Walter E. Todd complained to CIA Director Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter about the “duplication, wasted effort and needless expense” associated with the “production and dissemination of sociological intelligence in the field of population and manpower studies by various government agencies.” It would, he stated, be “most efficiently and economically produced under central direction,” allowing for “standardization of methods of compiling and maintaining data” for the National Intelligence Survey. Naval Intelligence Director Adm. Thomas B. Inglis agreed, calling for “production of population and manpower studies [to be] … coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency, … incorporated into the basic intelligence program,” and evaluated by a new “central working unit.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The Inter-Agency Committee on Population and Manpower Studies also insisted that an “adequate inventory of the human resources of foreign countries … [was] essential to both strategic and political operations,” and that the USA’s commitments required systematic intelligence relevant to the “war potential of strategic countries[,] foreign aid programs and growing world-wide concerns of American foreign policy.” For much of the world, including China, even basic statistics were considered “seriously incomplete or defective.” It was obvious that demographic intelligence was fragmented and weak, partly because different services were demanding different data: Army Intelligence (G-2) monitored strategically important foreign military manpower; the US Air Force’s Target Analysis Division gathered “minute details,” from “fugitive sources” if necessary, about industry and population centers; three analysts in the State Department’s Division of International and Functional Intelligence monitored key occupations, education, ethnicity, vital statistics, and disease in selected countries; and the Census Bureau gathered publicly available foreign demographic data, despite doubts about the reliability of official information.Footnote ⁵⁷

Woofter chaired the new Advisory Committee on International Population Statistics, which in February 1952 became the Subcommittee on Population and Manpower of the CIA’s influential Economic Intelligence Committee (EIC), an agenda-setting forum for numerous departments, agencies, and commissions. The fortnightly Population and Manpower meetings included sociologist Charles E. Hutchinson of the USAF’s Human Factors Division, Russian-born demographer Eugene Kulischer of the Library of Congress, who advised the Air Force on European labor-supply distribution, Conrad Taeuber of the Census Foreign Manpower Research Office, Oscar Weigert of the Labor Department’s Division of Foreign Labor Conditions, and Theodor Lit, the Labor Department’s Central and Eastern European specialist. State Department objections to the merging of its own liaison committee on Soviet and Eastern European manpower with the CIA’s interdepartmental demographic committee were overruled.Footnote ⁵⁸

Woofter coordinated this disparate research capacity and attempted to provide the CIA and the Joint Chiefs with a coherent picture of population and manpower changes and projections for key regions of the world. Military strength was measured in terms of American ability to overcome the Soviet Union; and yet, the administration’s policy objective was the reduction of conventional forces, making the demographic projections of the Subcommittee on Population and Manpower strategically and politically significant. Woofter’s remit was “to examine continuously intelligence bearing upon foreign populations and manpower for the purpose of assisting in the elimination of gaps and deficiencies in such intelligence which may be detrimental for the security of the United States.” His committee set about evaluating all existing intelligence analyses of manpower and labor in the Soviet Union and its satellites, and commissioned new research as necessary, such as Jacob Siegel’s The Population of Hungary, so as to create standardized country information sets that could underpin the CIA’s National Intelligence Survey.Footnote ⁵⁹

Military and economic security were paramount, but softer diplomatic and humanitarian impulses also played a part. The State Department’s Office of Intelligence and Research sought foreign demographic data to support human rights policies and the work of health organizations combatting epidemics (its representative on Woofter’s committee, Dudley Kirk, was an expert on health and population problems in the Near East, Asia, and Africa). In the summer of 1952, in the committee’s first progress report, Woofter outlined a program of highly ambitious international studies requiring masses of data on friendly and unfriendly nations: “This would include subjects such as size, composition, distribution, changes, character, and movements of the population and labor force; employment and unemployment, wages, hours and economic conditions and social welfare of labor; conditions of work; relations between employees and government and management; organizations and policies of employers and employees; hiring and recruiting of labor; public health and education.”Footnote ⁶⁰ His completed survey of all government research on the population and manpower of the Soviet bloc highlighted the “scarcity of personnel” and numerous gaps in essential information. The Labor Department and State Department wanted more information on living standards, labor law, workers’ morale in Eastern Europe, forced labor in China, and short- and long-run population and manpower estimates; the USAF, as ever, wanted more intelligence on “strategic air target areas”—such as the residential zones of industrial, construction, and government workers.Footnote ⁶¹

Southeast Asia became a looming concern in August 1954, when the Geneva Accords partitioned Vietnam after the First Indochina War. Woofter and the Population and Manpower Branch produced an Intelligence Memorandum on the region for the Joint Chiefs and their intelligence directorates, and the recently formed National Security Agency. At the time, the US Navy was helping to relocate three hundred thousand Vietnamese people from the North to the southern zone in Operation “Passage to Freedom,” part of the movement of one million civilians, in total, encouraged by intensive CIA propaganda.Footnote ⁶² Working largely from French materials of varying currency, Woofter estimated the populations of every province and city in Indochina, showing 30 million people still under “French Control” and less than half that number under “Communist Control.” He highlighted complex ethnic groupings and colonial legacies, including stark disparities in regional development and population density; for Vietnam, in particular, he calculated that 60 percent of the 7 million men of military age were under Viet Minh rule.Footnote ⁶³ Thus, basic demographic and cultural information was accumulated by US intelligence and military strategists on Vietnam during the mid-1950s, but it fell far short of anything that would support planning for future intervention.

After 1955, the CIA could point to an increased number of expert staff producing intelligence on population and manpower across the federal government. The cross-departmental Population and Manpower subcommittee was said to work well, “based on competence, good fellowship, and mutual respect,” although its members continued to differ on optimal analytic methods and global priorities.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Eisenhower administration’s New Look (NSC 162/2), formulated in October 1953 by the Joint Chiefs following the death of Stalin and a Korean truce, had declared that American “qualified manpower annually coming of military age is adequate to carry out our existing military plans,” but this judgement relied heavily on accurate forecasts of foreign manpower and productivity. The government also committed itself to finding “feasible political, economic, propaganda and covert measures designed to create and exploit troublesome problems of the USSR, … and retard the growth of the military and economic potential of the Soviet bloc.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Cold War strategy was still hampered by “critical deficiencies” in the Census Bureau’s data on Soviet industrial labor productivity and its provincial data on China and Southeast Asia. It took several years for Woofter’s efforts to produce the sort of range, quality, and integration of demographic intelligence that could document Soviet “troublesome problems.” By 1958, his committee arrived at reliable indicators for productivity in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and “Soviet Germany,” along with “a wide area of agreement on basic data and method.” Postwar work on the Soviet Union had focused on defection and repatriation, civilian employment, the “New Lands Program,” and forced labor, but the size of the population, itself, was regarded as an established fact. Major revisions were considered, therefore, after June 1956, when the USSR’s new handbook, The National Economy of the USSR, gave a population figure of 200.2 million people—between 20 and 40 million fewer than most Western calculations. If this was true, Woofter and his committee concluded, “It meant that the USSR had sustained much larger losses during and immediately after World War II than had been estimated.” This would imply that the war’s devastating effects on the birth rate and infant mortality had created “much smaller age cohorts, particularly in ages 10–15 years old.” A Census Bureau specialist on the Soviet Union, Jim Brackett, later recalled, “The new data were received with shock and disbelief in our office, particularly by the emigres…. The new data were potentially very valuable, and they had to be scrutinized carefully to determine their reliability.” Brackett and his colleagues concluded that Soviet military and civilian war losses and depressed wartime birth rates caused a net population decline of 30 million. This, they realized, would mean labor shortages, with implications for the USSR’s Five Year Plans and especially the Sixth and Seventh Five Year Plans (for 1956–60, and 1960–65), and suggested that “the estimates of, and Soviet policies on, forced labor, armed forces, and other non-reported categories of labor force were going to become more important than previously thought in the production of intelligence estimates of Soviet capabilities.” (Regarding China, the Census Bureau and Library of Congress concentrated on urban population characteristics, which the CIA analyzed and integrated with policy objectives in a series of studies on education, manpower, agriculture, and population control after 1956.)Footnote ⁶⁶

Drawing on new Census projections of Soviet fertility and population up to 1975 and a reassessment of age-sex distributions, Woofter issued a comparative Intelligence Memorandum, “Population Fertility in the USSR and the US.” He noted entirely opposite trends in the two superpowers: Soviet fertility was shown dropping by 18–20 percent after 1940 before stabilizing, whereas US fertility had risen between 37 percent and 55 percent and was continuing to increase. The US wartime baby boom and the “abnormally small number of war babies in the USSR” produced dramatically different labor force scenarios for the superpowers in the 1960s, in which the USSR would be required to shift farm workers into industry, increase productivity, direct school-leavers into key occupations, postpone retirement for elderly workers, and reduce numbers in the armed forces. The significant Soviet advantage over the United States in terms of men of military age (a gap of some 7 million in 1956) was expected to fall to just 3 million by 1975.Footnote ⁶⁷ These were all vital inferences for defense policymakers.

The clear value of demography to long-term security planning saw seventy government personnel engaged in “economic intelligence and related economic research” concerning foreign population and manpower studies by 1958; fifty of them worked on the Sino-Soviet bloc and all were in agencies represented on Woofter’s committee. In a move consistent with Eisenhower’s second-term attempts at open communication with the Kremlin, the State Department proposed exchange visits by Russian and American demographers and census officials. Although such dialogue on population studies did not, in fact, commence until the late 1960s, it was not an outlandish suggestion in 1958; in that year, US experts on Social Security visited the USSR and hosted a Soviet delegation in return, and similar exchanges involving print and radio journalists, mining engineers, and agricultural experts took place.Footnote ⁶⁸ When Woofter’s decade of secret population studies ended with his retirement in 1958 at the age of sixty-five, his CIA branch and his cross-departmental committee were coordinating demographic expertise in three areas vital to Eisenhower’s foreign policy: war planning, propaganda, and economic competition.

First, strategic air planning for a preferred “massive retaliation” through a second strike required robust data on the location, size, and concentrations of the civilian population and likely enemy losses. Less favored strategies also relied on demographic data: for example, according to advice given to presidential military adviser Gen. Maxwell Taylor by his Air Force staff assistant in 1961, another Berlin crisis might require a low-altitude first strike against military targets, “to eliminate Soviet intercontinental threat and … minimize damage to Soviet population, industry and governmental authority…. This kind of attack, employing air burst 1MT weapons, might result in Soviet casualties of less than 1 million and probably not more than 500,000.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Such assumptions, reliable or otherwise, were impossible without the work of government demographers.

Second, there was thought to be immense propaganda value in showing the gulf between occupational freedoms, labor productivity, and living standards in the US and in the USSR.Footnote ⁷⁰ Third, it was essential for American planning purposes to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union’s capacity to commit sufficient manpower to its infrastructure and output objectives, and sustain its military presence in the communist bloc. This forecasting capacity grew out of Woofter’s work in laying the foundations for Census Bureau and CIA studies of Soviet and other foreign populations for the duration of the Cold War. Annually revised demographic studies, such as “Population of the Communist Countries, Selected Years, 1938–1980,” fed into the National Intelligence Survey and were adapted for the CIA’s “Population Wall Chart,” which itself evolved into the National Basic Intelligence Factbook. (This compilation was declassified in 1971 and renamed World Factbook in 1981.) By the mid-1960s, standardized demographic intelligence was embedded in national security conversations, so that the role Woofter initially assumed in the CIA, adjudicating between agencies determined to protect their own data and methods, was no longer required. The Subcommittee on Population and Manpower was wound up by the EIC in 1966 and its functions given to the Subcommittee on General Economic Analysis, but Woofter’s work during the 1950s left a legacy of coherence and consistency in a vital area of classified government research.Footnote ⁷¹

IV

Jack Woofter’s first job after graduate school in 1913 was three years of fieldwork for a study of southern black education, paid for by a New York philanthropic fund and published by the US Bureau of Education. Like other reports on social conditions in the Progressive Era, it was welcomed by a federal administration that was happy to benefit from the resources and expertise of reform-minded citizens, but was not inclined to investigate regional racial conditions for itself, let alone intervene.Footnote ⁷² Twenty years on, when the government was more fully engaged with social science research during the Great Depression, it relied on directors of research like Woofter. These were scholars who willingly left academic life for work that was directly relevant to urgent social problems and reforms, despite the limited recognition and career progression on offer and the susceptibility of programs to changes in policy. Woofter’s own career was to differ from that of many academics who worked in Washington in the 1930s and 1940s, in that his skills were constantly in demand and were highly transferable to new branches of government, and the attraction of new challenges may explain his decision not to revert to a senior career in education.

In 1957, on the brink of retirement, Woofter published a reflection on the growing movement for civil rights and his own experiences as a campaigner for interracial cooperation and the eradication of lynching in the 1920s. It showed that, while his racial outlook had not altered significantly, he retained his optimism and faith in a strand of cautious southern white liberalism that linked men and women like Will Alexander, Lucy Randolph Mason, and Howard Odum—people committed to social justice, who reacted to the Great Depression with what southern journalist Ralph McGill called a “mighty surge of discussion, debate, self-examination, confession and release.”Footnote ⁷³ Hundreds of trained social scientists flocked to Washington or state capitals to enter government service during the 1930s and 1940s, sensing a duty during a national emergency to equip politicians and planners with policy-oriented research. Woofter’s career offers a clear example of an unusually durable and adaptable Progressive activist whose skills and evolving interests chimed with society’s needs during the series of domestic and international crises that the United States faced between the birth of Social Security and the onset of the national security state.

For several decades after World War I, many public officials and academics in the United States were skeptical about the long-term benefits of close collaboration between policymakers and social scientists, but researchers like Jack Woofter, whose role ultimately, as Richard Nathan has put it, was that of “amplifying issues and elucidating options,” could see the possibilities of policy-oriented scholarship and its contribution to the evolution of federal power.Footnote ⁷⁴ Woofter’s shifting administrative status and the secrecy surrounding his final years in Washington may have contributed to an undeserved anonymity, but he was recognized by his fellow professionals for his skill and wisdom in coordinating major research programs and for his own work on race, farm economics, welfare, and demography. His clear and comprehensive reports—typified by Landlord and Tenant on the Cotton Plantation, his scholarship on the applications of research, and the methodological rigor of his projections concerning social programs and national security—were expressions of one of the most useful American social science careers in the middle years of the twentieth century.