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'''Walter Francis WILLCOX'''

b. 22 March 1861 - d. 29 October 1964

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'''Summary.'''  Willcox, demographer and statistician, founded
the statistical research office in the U.S. Census Office, and was
a major innovator in demographic analysis and apportionment theory and 
methodology in the United States.

Walter F. Willcox was born in Reading, Massachusetts, and
received Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Amherst College in 1884 and
1888.  He went on to attend Columbia University and he continued his
studies in Germany in the late 1880s.  There he encountered statistical
methods and ideas, and shifted his earlier interests in law and philosophy
to data-inspired empirical social research.  He received a PhD from
Columbia University in 1891 after completing a thesis on divorce (published
as ''The Divorce Problem: A Study in Statistics'', (Studies in History,
Economics and Public Law, New York: Columbia University Press: 1897).

Willcox took a position as Professor of Economics and Statistics at Cornell
in 1891, served as  dean from 1902 to 1907, and remained at Cornell until
he retired to emeritus status in 1931.  His major contributions to
statistics were in the realm of demography, apportionment methodology, and
the development of the federal statistical system.  From 1899 to 1902 he
served as Chief Statistician for the Twelfth Census of the United States
and in that capacity encouraged the hiring of PhD trained statisticians to
the positions of special agents in charge of the technical development of
censustaking.  Those appointees included Allyn Young, Wesley Mitchell,
Joseph Hill, Carroll Doten, William Rossiter, Warren Persons, E. Dana
Durand, all of whom served as Presidents of the American Statistical
Association in later years.  During his tenure at the Census Bureau, he
encouraged the production and publication of special analytic reports on
census methods and census results.  These were published as ''Supplementary
Analysis and Derivative Tables: Twelfth Census of the United States''
(Washington, GPO, 1906) and provided the prototype for the development in
to the Census Monograph Series.  Willcox himself continued his relationship
with the Census Bureau after returning to Cornell in 1902; he served as a
special agent from 1902 on.  He was President of the American Statistical
Association in 1912, the American Economic Association in 1915, and a long
time member of the ASA-AEA Census Advisory Committee which began after
World War I.   He was elected President of the International Statistical
Institute in 1947.  

As a founding father of the field of demography (and the Population
Association of America) in the United States, Willcox encouraged the
development of data on birth, fertility, marriage and divorce, mortality,
migration and population composition.  He developed methods of analysis,
including a ratio of children under five to women of childbearing age which
could be use to calculate fertility rates in the absence of birth
registration data.  And he had a long term interest in congressional
apportionment methodology, advocating the method of major fractions from
the turn of the century on.  Willcox played a major role in the
controversies over the census apportionment method in the 1920s, when
Congress refused to reapportion itself because it could not sort out the
conflicting criticisms of the quality of the 1920 census, two conflicting
formulas for apportionment, and the changing demography -- particularly
urbanization -- of the United States.  Willcox testified before Congress
while in his nineties on these issues, remaining extremely critical of
Congress' choice of the method of equal proportion over his method of major
fractions.  Though he had participated in the development of the
legislative compromise that ended the Congressional stalemate over
apportionment methods in the late 1920s, he remained critical of the
failure of Congress to support equal districting within the states as well
as equal apportionment among the states.  He was also a lone voice in the
wilderness deploring the increasing malapportionment of Congress in the
first half of the twentieth century, and was 101 when the United States
Supreme Court rectified the situation with the ``one person, one vote"
decision of 1962.    Willcox died in 1964.  

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====References====
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|1}}||valign="top"|  Grossman, David Michael (1973). Professors and Public Service, 1885-1925: A Chapter in the Professionalization of  the Social Sciences. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University, St. Louis. For his papers see the Walter Willcox Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|2}}||valign="top"|  Willcox, Walter (1897). ''The Divorce Problem: A Study in Statistics''. Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Columbia University Press, New York. 
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|3}}||valign="top"|  Willcox, Walter (1940). ''Studies in American Demography''. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.  
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|valign="top"|{{Ref|4}}||valign="top"|  Willcox, Walter (1933). ''Introduction to the Vital Statistics of the United  States, 1900 to 1930''. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.
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Reprinted with permission from
Christopher Charles Heyde and Eugene William Seneta (Editors),
Statisticians of the Centuries, Springer-Verlag Inc., New York, USA.

[[Category:Statprob]]
[[Category:Biographical]]