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'''Francis Amasa WALKER'''

b. 2 July 1840 - d. 5 January 1897

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'''Summary.''' Walker, United States Civil War 
general and President of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
contributed to statistics through service1 as Director of the
U.S. Census Office and president of the American
Statistical Association. 

Francis A. Walker (1840-97) made significant
contributions in advancing the discipline of statistics during
his relatively short life.  Walker was born into a prominent
Massachusetts family, graduated from Amherst College in 1860, and
like many of his generation, entered the military at 21 to fight
in the Civil War.  He left the military in 1865 as an Adjutant
General.  In later life, he became a major Gilded Age
intellectual.  He became Superintendent of the Census in 1869 at
the age of 29; was appointed President of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in 1881; and served as President of the
American Statistical Association from 1883-97.  His contributions
to the field of statistics derive from his positions as Census
Superintendent, ASA President, and public intellectual. 

Walker entered federal service in the Treasury Department in
early 1969 as plans for the 1870 census were being developed.  He
prepared a report for Congress on reforming census legislation;
Congress rejected the legislation.  He was formally appointed
Superintendent in January 1870, and oversaw the field enumeration
and data processing and publications for the 1870 count.  A
temporary Census Office housed in the Department of Interior took
the decennial census.  Walker oversaw the work of about 6,500
enumerators and 400 officer workers who collected and tabulated
(by hand) population, agriculture, mortality and manufacturing
data on 39 million Americans.  He published five main volumes of
census results and a statistical atlas, and disbanded the office,
as required, in 1873.  His main accomplishments of running an
efficient operation in 1870 made it possible for the census
reform legislation, which had failed in Congress in 1869-70, to
be passed in the late 1870s.  Walker returned to direct the 1880
count.  In that year, the American population topped 50 million. 
Walker made significant changes in field enumeration methods.  He
enlarged the scope of inquiries, instituted civil service
examinations for office staff, expanded the publications of the
census to 22 volumes, and quadrupled the size of the clerical
staff to 1500 people.  The enumerator force grew to over 31,000
to speed the field operations portion of  the count.  He also
made numerous less dramatic changes in organization.  Walker
became only the second census superintendent in the U.S. history
to oversee more than one decennial count, and only one in three
in the 200 year history of the census.

He left the Superintendency in 1881 and never returned to
federal office.  But he did continue to have a significant
advisory role to federal statistical officials.  In particular,
he recognized that the growing size of the American population,
and the concomitant growth in the demand for data, made hand
tabulation increasingly problematic.  He encouraged the system of
machine tabulation developed by Herman Hollerith -- which was put
in place for the 1890 census.  That system became the foundation
of IBM.

Walker's second major role was as president of the American
Statistical Association.  He took over the position in 1883 at
Edward Jarvis' death and continued in the position until his
death in 1897.  He oversaw the development of ASA from a small
Boston learned society of less than 75 members, to a national
professional association with a respected journal, and national
meetings.  Walker hired and charged a young instructor at M.I.T.,
Davis R. Dewey, to undertake the tasks of what he called
"expanding the influence of the statistical association."  The
"Journal of the American Statistical Association'', then called the
''Publications'' of ASA, began in 1888; membership grew to around 500
at his death in early 1897.

Throughout the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, Walker also remained
an influential economic and social writer and observer.  As the
first President of the American Economic Association, he played a
major role in the development of modern economics in the United
States.  He contributed a plethora of books and articles on
demography, political economy, immigration, and social policy. 
Nevertheless, from the perspective of the late twentieth century,
some of his work is marred by the increasingly strident nativism
which gripped the writings of late nineteenth century elite
intellectuals.  He became the intellectural founder of the
immigration restriction movement in the United States,
publicizing the supposed racial differences between old and new
immigrants -- and proclaiming the decided inferiority of the new
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.  These ``beaten men
from beaten races," he claimed, were lowering the American
standard of living and threatened the future of the polity.  Much
of his thought was taken up by a later generation of
intellectuals and written into the now discredited National
Origins Act of 1924, which ended the three century American
committment to unfettered immigration.

Walker died rather suddenly at the age of 56, just days
after giving the address opening the first meeting of ASA outside
Boston --in Washington, DC in December 1896.  That meeting led to
the founding of the Washington Statistical Society.  His
achievements in developing major federal data systems, in
promoting the organizational development of statistics, and of
bringing statistical ideas to a wide audience, left the field
much the richer than he found it --and prepared for the great
innovations in inferential statistics which were about to
transform the discipline.  

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====References====
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|1}}||valign="top"|  Anderson, Margo (1988). ''The American Census: A Social History''. Yale University Press, New Haven. (Treats his career as Census Superintendent.) 
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|2}}||valign="top"|  Munroe, James Phinney (1923). ''A Life of Francis Amasa Walker''. Henry Holt &amp; Co., New York. 
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|3}}||valign="top"|  Newton, Bernard (1968). ''The Economics of Francis Amasa Walker; American Economics in Transition''. A. M. Kelley, New York. 
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|4}}||valign="top"|  Walker, Francis Amasa (1970). ''Discussions in Economics and Statistics''. 2 volumes, Davis R. Dewey, ed., Burt Franklin, New York. A reprint of the 1899 edition. (Compiles Walker's articles.) 
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|5}}||valign="top"|  Walker, Francis Amasa (1887). ''Political Economy''. H. Holt and Company, New York. 
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|6}}||valign="top"|  Whitaker, John K. (1997). Enemies or Allies?  Henry George and Francis Amasa Walker One Century Later. ''Journal of Economic Literature'', XXXV, 1891-1915. (Contains recent bibliography.)
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Margo J. Anderson

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