Interviews Referencing Frank H. Hankins PAA President in 1945-46
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DEMOGRAPHIC DESTINIES Interviews with Presidents of the Population Association of America Interviews Referencing Frank H. Hankins PAA President in 1945-46 This series of interviews with Past PAA Presidents was initiated by Anders Lunde (PAA Historian, 1973 to 1982) And continued by Jean van der Tak (PAA Historian, 1982 to 1994) And then by John R. Weeks (PAA Historian, 1994 to present) With the collaboration of the following members of the PAA History Committee: David Heer (2004 to 2007), Paul Demeny (2004 to 2012), Dennis Hodgson (2004 to present), Deborah McFarlane (2004 to 2018), Karen Hardee (2010 to present), Emily Merchant (2016 to present), and Win Brown (2018 to present) FRANK H. HANKINS We do not have an interview with Frank Hankins, who was the ninth PAA President (1945-46). However, as Andy Lunde and Jean van der Tak (VDT) were interviewing other past presidents, they regularly asked questions about those early presidents whom they had been unable to interview. Below are the excerpted comments about Frank Hankins. CAREER HIGHLIGHTS Frank Hamilton Hankins was born in Wilkshire, Ohio in 1877, but grew up in Kansas. He graduated from Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas, in 1901. He was superintendent of schools in Waverly, Kansas, for two years before going to Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1908. He taught at Clark University from 1906 to 1922, and was head of its Department of Political and Social Science. He then moved to Smith College, where he taught until he retired in 1946, just after serving as PAA President. However, he continued to work professionally in a variety of teaching and research capacities until his death from a heart attack at age 92, in 1970, in New York City. From Andy Lunde's interview with Frank Notestein in 1973: LUNDE: Frank Hankins? He was President in 1945-46. NOTESTEIN: I can't tell you too much about Frank Hankins. I knew him pretty well. He was at Smith College for years. A sociologist--a social biologist, a field that gets more attention now. Of somewhat rightwing persuasion. Articulate, good speaker. Interested in pushing population; interested in the qualitative aspect of population. 2 Frank Hamilton Hankins 1877-1970 Author(s): Charles H. Page Source: The American Sociologist, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Aug., 1970), pp. 288-289 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27701651 Accessed: 21-07-2020 23:28 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Sociologist This content downloaded from 146.244.101.138 on Tue, 21 Jul 2020 23:28:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms fact, when combined with his failing health in later years, from 1922 to 1946, for most of this period as department probably contributed to his untimely passing from the Lin chairman, was an exciting and noncloistered campus under coln scene of which he had been so much a part, and to the presidency of the nonpareil William Allen Nielson. which he had given so much. Hankins's colleagues in history and the social sciences in Dr. Foster is survived by his wife, Ella Mae, who continues cluded Barnes, Ray Billington, G. A. Borgese, Merle Curti, his contacts with the school by operating a day-care center Harold Faulkner, Kurt Koffka, Hans Kohn, and Will Orton, for faculty members and Lincoln community members. He as well as such sociologists as Howard Becker, Gladys Bry is aso survived by a son, Laurence, Jr., and a daughter, son, and Kingsley Davis (Hankins built well?in succeeding Mrs. Yvonne Sutherland. decades Smith has maintained a cadre of excellent sociolo Reginald McGhee gists). In Smith's cosmopolitan setting that offered the Martin Oppenheimer same challenge and stimulation as had the earlier Clark, Lincoln University, Hankins was a social activist, a leader of his profession, Pennsylvania and a renowned and peripatetic teacher. A deeply concerned student of population, he was active on the governing boards of the American Eugenics Society, the Population Reference Bureau, the Euthanasian Society of America, the Interna FRANK HAMILTON HANKINS tional Population Union, and the Planned Parenthood Fed eration; an ardent supporter of individual rights, he was an 1877-1970 early member of the American Civil Liberties Union; a con firmed rationalist, he was a long-time contributor to The During his ninety-second year and until the end a man of Humanist (in 1960 he was named a "Humanist Pioneer"). remarkable vigor, Frank H. Hankins died of a heart attack In 1930 Hankins was elected the first president of the East on January 24 in New York City. This event took from our ern Sociological Society; in 1936 he became the first editor ranks an eminent sociologist and demographer, distinguished of the American Sociological Review, and a year later he author and lecturer, provocative and influential teacher, was elected president of the American Sociological Society; ardent proponent of a strictly scientific sociology and con in 1945 he became president of the American Population As cerned humanist, and beloved friend of many members of sociation. Hankins taught and lectured widely: at Amherst at least three generations. His "vita," only a part of which can College (where he subversively introduced sociology under be reported here, merely suggests the magnitude and diver the cloak of "economics"), Columbia, the New School, sity of Frank Hankins's legacy. Berkeley, the Army Center at Biarritz (1945 to 1946), and, Born in Wilkshire, Ohio, Hankins grew up in Kansas, following his retirement from Smith, at the University of where he graduated from Baker University in 1901. With his Pennsylvania (1946 to 1948). He was a member of Research A.B. in hand, he followed the then-familiar pattern of serv Sociologists, the Committee on Family Research, and the ing as superintendent of schools (in Waverly, Kansas) for American Society of Naturalists. In 1936 he studied, on two years before entering Columbia University. As a grad the scene, social conditions in Nazi Germany. uate student and fellow in statistics, Hankins was strongly Hankins's bibliography is impressive. In addition to his influenced by the philosophy and logic of John Stuart Mill, volume on Quetelet, he contributed widely to scholarly by the sociology of Giddings (for whom he had lasting ad journals, anthologies, and the Encyclopaedia of the Social miration), by Spencer and Ward, and by the quantitative Sciences (seventeen articles, including sturdy pieces on work of Quetelet, Galton, and Pearson; his doctoral disserta Charles Darwin, birth control, divorce, and social dis tion, Adolphe Quetelet as Statistician (1908), was an im crimination). His ground-breaking study, The Racial Basis portant contribution to the development of empirical sociol of Civilization: A Critique of the Nordic Doctrine, was pub ogy. lished in 1926, and two years later appeared An Introduction For sixteen years (1906 to 1922) Hankins was a member to the Study of Society (revised in 1935), a textual treatise of the faculty of Clark University, and from 1908 he was presenting Hankins's principal theoretical and substantive head of its Department of Political and Social Science. Under concerns and convictions. the presidential leadership of the influential psychologist Hankins was a scientific determinist, but he remained' G. Stanley Hall, Clark University was an important center skeptical of the capacity of social science to rival the the of research, graduate study, and stimulating scholarly con oretical and applied achievements of the natural sciences troversy, spurred by the famous visits of Sigmund Freud and because of the complexity and changing nature of social Havelock Ellis, such dynamic local figures as the psychia causation. In a recent private document, he expressed his trist Adolf Meyer, the learned and bombastic Harry Elmer general orientation by rejecting the "robot" notion "that Barnes, and Hankins himself. Among Hankins's students the stream of culture is a wholly independent variable and at Clark were Howard Odum, E. Franklin Frazier, and Clif mankind wholly dependent thereon, because the human ford Kirkpatrick, who were encouraged by their young mind is the catalytic agent in culture change and scientific teacher-colleague to pursue careers as sociologists; that knowledge the basic progressive factor therein." His writings they did so has of course enriched our many-sided field. show an abiding and powerful interest in the role of bio Hankins's years at Clark were busy and productive: he logical factors in social life and history and, conversely, in contributed substantially to scholarly journals, lectured fre the roles of such selective processes as urbanization, educa quently at other universities, was an active member for sev tion, persecution, and war in the determination of population* eral years of the Worcester school committee, studied social quantity and quality. He argued strongly that differential conditions in Europe before and after World War I, and in fertility between classes is dysfunctional for society and that 1921 taught at the ?cole Libre des Sciences Politique in this problem should be met by birth control: more for the Paris. In 1922 Hankins, with Barnes and others, left Clark lower strata and less for the privileged. University, but Hankins returned in 1964 to receive the Hankins was critical of the egalitarian assumptions of Doctorate of Humane Letters.