Dorothy Swaine Thomas

Dorothy Swaine Thomas was born on October 24, 1899 in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of John Knight and Sarah (Swaine) Thomas. She received her B.A. degree from Barnard College in 1922 and earned a Ph.D. in 1924 from the University of London School of Economics where she was a recipient of the Hutchinson Research Medal.

Between the years of 1924 and 1948, she held research and/or academic appointments at the University of California at Berkeley, Yale University, Columbia Teachers College, the Carnegie Corporation, the Social Science Research Council, the Social Science Institute at the University of Stockholm, and the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.

Thomas became the first female professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1948 where she served as a research professor of sociology in the Wharton School. While at the University, she was a co-director of the Study of Population Redistribution and Economic Growth from 1952 to 1959, research director of the Population Studies Center from 1959 to 1970, and co-director of Population Studies Center from 1964 to 1970. She also was instrumental in developing the doctoral training program in demography. When she retired in 1970, the University gave her an honorary doctorate for her influential work in the field of demography.

Even after her retirement, Thomas continued to teach for four years at Georgetown University. She also served as a United Nations technical consultant at various times with the U.S. Bureau of the Budget, U. S. Department of Agriculture, National Resources Committee, the U.S. Bureau of the Census and other national state agencies.

Thomas was active in numerous professional associations. She served as president of both the Population Association of America and the American Sociological Society. For the latter, her Presidential Address, delivered at the 1952 ASA Annual Meeting was entitled “Experiences in Interdisciplinary Research“.

Thomas was a prolific writer in the field of population statistics. She authored or co-authored six books and 71 scholarly articles between 1922 and 1969, including the landmark three-volume study that she co-authored with Simon Kuznets, Population Redistribution and Economic Growth in the United States, 1870-1950.

Dr. Dorothy Thomas died on 1 May 1977 in Bethesda, Maryland. She was the widow of the late William I. Thomas.

Obituary 

Written by Evertt S. Lee, Published in Footnotes, August 1977

Dorothy Swaine Thomas died on May 1, 1977, aged 77. Hers was a long career, over 50 years of innovative work. Originally she had planned to become a teacher of Latin or of English, but as an undergraduate at Columbia University she came under the influence of William F. Ogburn and with him wrote two important articles, “Are Inventions Inevitable?” and “The Influence of Business Cycles on Certain Social Conditions”, both published in 1922. These articles set the stage for her later career. To the last she was preoccupied with cycles and trends in human affairs, and she was ever searching for the ways in which social and economic processes were linked.

From Columbia she went to the London School of Economics, an institution which was happily free of rigid requirements, defining a university as a place to learn and to attempt creative work rather than as a place to be taught. Studying under Arthur Bowley and guided by Sir William Beveridge, she completed her studies and produced the path breaking Social Aspects of the Business Cycle in two years. For this she won the Hutchinson Research Medal and received the PhD in Economics.

Back in America she did post­doctoral work with Wesley Mitchell and was referred by him to W.I. Thomas. Joining forces the two Thomases undertook a study of child development, the results of which were published in 1928 in The Child in America, Behavior Problems and Programs. Theirs were different minds, complementary rather than similar. W.I. Thomas chose to search for the roots of individual behavior, and his approach was intuitive and general. Dorothy Thomas, on the other hand, sought to establish relationships among social, economic, and demo­graphic processes, and her approach was that of a specialist, amassing and analyzing numerical data. Eventually they were married, operating as sup­portive but independent individuals.

Together with Gunnar and Alva Myrdal they planned a massive study of the Swedish people, planned as a parallel to The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, the summit of W.I. Thomas’ achievements. The collabor­ation did not work out as intended; the Myrdals became involved in politics and W.I. Thomas chose to study Swedish behavior documents with Olaf Kinberg. The main product was Dorothy Thomas’ Social and Economic Aspects of Swedish Population Movements, 1750-1933, a classic that was to set the stage for hundreds of similar studies on a smaller scale. It was in her Swedish work that she developed an historical sense.

Some of her most important work came in an interlude. When Pearl Harbor was bombed and the Japanese on the West Coast were detained, she entered the camps with a corps of assistants and collected life histories and day-by-day accounts of camp life. She quantified whatever she could, but in The Spoilage and The Salvage, her two books that detailed the Japanese experience, the influence of W.I. Thomas and his concern for motivation and individual response are clearly evident. These are restrained books, almost cold in their treatment of repeated outrage. She refused as a scientist to let the sympathies and emotions she felt strongly interfere with the development of a meticulous account, and she was vindicated when the Supreme Court accepted her books as unbiased evidence of our crimes against our fellow citizens. She had again pro­duced masterpieces.

After the war she collaborated with another Nobel Prize winner in economics, Simon Kuznets, in the University of Pennsylvania Studies of Population Redistribution and Economic Growth. Here history was combined with demography and economics in a series of investigations which form the basic materials for a synthesis that has not as yet been made.

Dorothy Thomas held research positions at Teachers College, Columbia University, and at Yale before she went to Berkeley in 1940 as a full professor. Here for the first time she had students and immediately began to publish with them, characteristically listing them as senior authors and spurring them to publish on their own. No lecturer, she was a great teacher with a long list of distinguished students, now working in several fields. Her method was that of the master craftsman, introducing the apprentice bit by bit to the research process, and when the journeyman stage was complete, she encouraged attempts at independent design.

Words on a manuscript, hers or a student’s, were a challenge to Dorothy Thomas. Her motto, like Strunk’s, was “Cut, cut, cut”. She detested verbosity and, except for euphony or elegance, she never used a two syllable word where a one syllable one would do. Above all she insisted on clarity and restraint, and she would brook none of the padding and pretended erudition that mars social science journals. A course with her was a course in rhetoric as well as in demography or sociology. Her aim was to be a master craftsman and to turn out master craftsmen. ln both she succeeded.

Personally, she was moody, a fitful, furious worker. She considered her­self a “dreadful procrastinator”, ruing the things she had begun and never finished. She was alternately kind and irascible, always unpredictable. She fought for her friends and her students, and when most of the academic world and its supporting foundations drew back in fright, she fought McCarthy. Many honors came to her and among those she valued most were the Presidency of the American Sociological Association and of the Population Association of America. Perhaps a greater tribute, her work continues with her students and her students’ students.