Donald Ramsey Young
July 5, 1898 – April 17, 1977
Donald Young served as the 45th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, “Sociology and the Practicing Profession,” was delivered on August 31, 1955 at the Association’s Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, and was later published in the American Sociological Review (ASR December 1955 Vol 20 No 6, pp 641-648). An obituary for Young was published in the August 1977 issue of Footnotes.
Obituary
Written by Wilbert E. Moore, published in Footnotes, August 1977.
Donald Ramsey Young, the forty-fifth President of the American Sociological Association (1955) died on April 17, 1977, a few months short of his 79th birthday. He had been in a fully alert but physically weakened state for several months following surgery for removal of a malignancy, and did not recover from further surgery in Allentown, Pennsylvania, near his birthplace and current residence in Macungie. He is survived by his widow, Ada Wise Young, two children, and a number of grandchildren.
Don was educated at a private preparatory school, Lafayette College (AB, 1919), and the University of Pennsylvania (AM, 1920; PhD, 1922). Unlike many sociologists of his age, his graduate work was in the discipline which became his life career. (Indeed, one of his principal professors at Pennsylvania was James P. Lichtenberger, the twelfth President of the ASA.) He began his teaching at Pennsylvania as an Assistant Instructor in 1919, moving through the academic ranks to the professorship in 1935, serving for several years also as Chairman of the Sociology Department. He held the rank of Professor (mainly on leave of absence after about 1937) until 1947.
Meanwhile, Don had begun his long years at the Social Science Research Council in New York. Starting as Research Secretary (1932-1945), he became Executive Director in 1945, a title changed to President in 1948. During those years the Council took on its enduring functions of securing foundation support for pre-doctoral and post-doctoral training fellowships; research planning committees comprised of qualified social scientists, often on topics that crossed disciplinary lines; and maintaining a substantial publication program for monographs, resulting from Council sponsored activities. The salaried staff associates at the Council were professional social scientists, most of whom kept up their own scholarly activities while shepherding the activities of various review panels and planning committees.
During 1942-45, Don spent most of his time in Washington, as consultant to the Joint Army and Navy Committee on Welfare and Recreation, concerned with a broad range of issues relating to those in military service in World War II.
In 1948 Don became General Director of the Russell Sage Foundation, a title changed to President in 1955, where he remained until his retirement in 1963. During his service at Russell Sage he succeeded in getting the Foundation’s endowment on a financially sound basis, and developed new directions for its activities and support. Early concerned with various charitable activities, the Foundation had been a major influence in the professionalization of social work and social service administration. Under Don Young’s auspices, the mission of the Foundation was extended to include the introduction of a social-science component in medical education (and thus in the development of medical sociology). With that development on a firm footing, principal interest turned to interdisciplinary training and research in law schools. (Curiously, educators in law schools and business schools were more resistant to a social science perspective than were the medical educators. Lawyers and professors of business administration tended to regard their curricula as already comprising applied social science, which needed no supplementing from such disciplines as sociology and social psychology.)
Don’s initial retirement was brief, as in 1964 he accepted a professorship at Rockefeller University, which continued until 1969. Subsequent to his second retirement, he spent a considerable part of 1972 as executive consultant to the Joao Pinhiero Foundation in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Otherwise, he served as a (mostly unpaid) consultant to the Social Science Research Council, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, university administrators, and such private citizens as the undersigned. Until a few months before his death he kept active in the American Philosophical Society, that august learned society seated in Philadelphia, where he was a member of the membership committee and of the hard-working research committee that evaluates proposals for small grants.
Don Young’s major publications were not extensive, as his principal career activities turned almost entirely to research promotion and evaluation. His monograph, Motion Pictures: A Study in Social Legislation, published in 1922, was a revised version of his doctoral thesis. His most influential work, American Minority Peoples, 1932, instead of containing chapters devoted to various minorities, dealt with majority-minority relations topically. A follow-up study, Minority Peoples in the Depression, 1937, has recently been reprinted by Arno Press. Before I left the Russell Sage Foundation, I persuaded Don to write the longer and more substantial of the two essays that comprised our joint book, Trusteeship and the Management of Foundations, 1970. He edited several topical volumes of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and wrote a number of articles for the professional journals and various symposia. Consistent with his “sponsoring” role, Don had a substantial bookcase, in his study above the detached “summer kitchen” in his home in Macungie, comprising volumes in which his decision on a fellowship or a research grant had been crucial for completion of the scholarly product.
In a sense, Don Young became an ”elder statesman” in sociology at a relatively young age, and remained one while the passing years simply confirmed the authenticity of the position. Aside from his recital of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” in the Pennsylvania German dialect- a language learned in childhood and used throughout his life with some of his neighbors around Macungie-one of my favorite recollections is that of Don “holding court” in the lobbies at meetings of the Sociological Association, advising supplicants on sources of fellowships, grants, and jobs. I dedicated one of my books to him, as “the wisest man I have ever known.” That is a judgment not unique to me, and now requires only changing the tense of the verb. I should have preferred not to have that duty.
