Philip Morris Hauser
September 27, 1909 – December 13, 1994
Philip M. Hauser served as the 58th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential address, entitled “The Chaotic Society: Product of the Social Morphological Revolution,” was presented on August 28, 1968, at the ASA Annual Meeting in Boston. The address was later published in the February 1969 issue of the American Sociological Review (ASR Vol 34 No 1, pp 1-19).
Obituary
Upon his death in 1994, the following obituary was published by ASA and PAA. It was printed in Footnotes in February, 1995.
Philip M. Hauser, one of the nation’s leading sociologists and a pioneer in the fields of urban studies and demography, died December 13, 1994 in Chicago at age 85. He was former president of PAA, the American Sociological Association, and the American Statistical Association.
Hauser founded the University of Chicago’s Population Research Center. His interests included the relationships between population characteristics and development, factors affecting fertility and mortality rates, and the study of racial segregation and many other aspects of urbanization.
He was an author or editor of a number of important books and studies, including the first report in 1964 on desegregation of the Chicago public schools. He also wrote Government Statistics for Business Use (1956), Urbanization in Asia and the Far East (1957), Population and World Politics (1958), The Study of Population: An Inventory and Appraisal (1959), Population Perspectives (1961), Urbanization in Latin America (1961), The Study of Urbanization (1965), The Population Dilemma (1962, 1968), Differential Mortality in the United States: A Study in Socioeconomic Epidemiology (1973, with Evelyn Kitagawa), and World Population and Development: Challenges and Perspectives (1979).
During the 30 years he was Director of the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago, he trained approximately 100 Ph.D. students and many other M.A. students. About half of these students were from other countries and are now stationed throughout the world.
Hauser was a dynamic speaker, often called upon to explain and interpret population data to a wide variety of audiences, including government panels, academic conferences, business groups, and for television and radio programs.
Hauser received a Ph.B. in 1929, an M.A. in 1933, and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1938, all at the University of Chicago. He began his studies of sociology at a time when the field was gaining prominence, through the leadership of a group of professors who founded what came to be known as the Chicago School of Sociology. Members of the Chicago School took a keen interest in urban affairs and were leaders in developing new methods for studying cities, such as participant observation and the gathering of life histories.
Hauser continued that interest as a member of the sociology faculty at Chicago, where he was named an instructor in 1932, a post he held until 1938, although he was on leave from 1934 to 1937 while serving as a researcher with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. He worked for the U.S. Census Bureau from 1938 to 1947, holding positions as assistant chief statistician for population and eventually being named deputy director in 1946. From 1945 to 1947 he also served as assistant to the secretary of commerce for policy and program purposes.
He rejoined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1947 as Professor of Sociology and taught classes on weekends while serving as Acting Director of the Census Bureau from 1949 to 1950. He was named Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology in 1974. He was Director of the Population Research Center from 1947 to 1979.
While working at the U.S. Census Bureau, Hauser helped improve methods of estimating the size of undercounted populations, particularly African Americans.
Throughout his career, Hauser was called upon for advice by government agencies. He was a member of the Technical Advisory Committee for Population Statistics with the U.S. Bureau of the Census from 1960 to 1972 and served for a time as its chairman. He served as U.S. representative to the Population Commission for the United Nations from 1947 to 1951 and was a statistical advisor to the governments of Burma and Thailand during the 1950s.
Hauser was especially concerned with the consequences of racial segregation and overpopulation. In Chicago, he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council from 1958 to 1970 and a consultant for the city’s Department of Development and Planning and the Department of Health. In 1963 he became Chairman of the Advisory Panel for the Desegregation of the Chicago Public Schools. The board accepted but did not act on the report, which called for the clustering of high schools so that students could choose which to attend.
During the 1960s, he and Kitagawa studied mortality figures and found very large differentials based on income and social status, with college-educated people living longer than less-educated people.
Hauser continued to pursue research on population and segregation issues. In the early 1980s, he assembled a team of experts to study the remapping of city wards. Using the 1980 U.S. Census of Chicago, Hauser testified in U.S. District Court that the map had diluted the voting strengths of minority groups, especially African Americans and Hispanics.
He was he was predeceased by his wife, Zelda B. Hauser, in 1983. He is survived by his son, William B. Hauser, of Rochester, NY; a daughter, Martha Hauser Baxter of Ann Arbor, Michigan; four grandsons; a brother, Julius Hauser, of Rockville, MD; and sisters, Isobel Katz of San Diego, CA, and Lillian Dreiser of Downers Grove, IL.
