Walter F Willcox

Professors Willcox Share Unique Emeritus Ranking
The Ithaca Journal, Jul 13 1963, P. 3, with photo

 "The Professors Willcox, father and son, of Cornell University, have a distinction believed to be unique in this country and possibly in the world. For since the first day of this month both have born the title of professor emeritus.
  As far as is known there is no other instance in which both a father and son, both living, have reached retirement and have been awarded the title of professor emeritus.
  The son, Bertram F. Willcox, has been professor emeritus for only a few days, but his father, Walter F. Willcox, has had that title for 32 years, and that also may be a record in American higher education. The father is in his 103rd year, while his son, sometimes referred to as the 'young Professor Willcox,' to distinguish him from his father, was 68 years old on July 11."

Cornell Memorial Statement for Walter Francis Willcox  (March 22, 1861 — October 30, 1964)

"Walter Francis Willcox died at his home, after a brief illness, October 30, 1964. On March 22 he had celebrated his one hundred and third birthday. At the time of his death he was the oldest living alumnus of Phillips Andover Academy, of Amherst College, from which he received degrees of A.B., A.M. and LL.D., and (it was believed) of Columbia University, from which he received the LL.B. and Ph.D. He was also the oldest Professor Emeritus of Cornell and the only one known to have a son also a Professor Emeritus of the same institution.
  Born in Reading, Massachusetts, in 1861, he was the son of a Congregational clergyman. Both his mother and father hoped that he, too, would enter the ministry but, after a passing interest in Greek, he turned instead to philosophy. Even before completing his graduate work, however, he found his attention drawn to those human and social problems that were to be his principal concern for the rest of his life. Although he came to Cornell in 1891 on a temporary appointment as an instructor of philosophy, the following year he accepted a position in the Department of Economics, rapidly making statistics his special field and himself a recognized authority and important innovator in that subject.
  In 1899 he was asked to serve as chief statistician of the Twelfth Census of the United States, a post that took him to Washington until 1901. Part of his assignment consisted in preparing the new apportionment tables for the Congress; this brought to his attention the alarming rate at which the House had been growing as new seats were added to provide representation for the country’s expanding population, and the unsound method by which seats were apportioned. The House, he felt, could never realize its potentialities as a constructive political institution unless it were reduced to a manageable size—he considered three hundred the optimum number; but he also recognized the virtually insuperable obstacles in the way of any revision that would require incumbent representatives to vote some of their own seats out of existence. He did think, however, that it should be feasible to stem the previously unchecked growth of the body by a law fixing its existing size and providing for automatic reapportionment following each census. He even hoped that this technique might be used to reduce the size of the House by ten seats with each successive census. That proved too Utopian but in 1931, after a very long campaign, Congress finally did fix the size of the House at its existing 435 seats and also provided for regular reapportionment according to a plan Dr. Willcox himself had derived from the principle of “major fractions” originally formulated by Daniel Webster. Walter Willcox’ contribution to this achievement received unprecedented tribute from Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the sponsor of the bill, in a letter to Cornell President Jacob Gould Schurman. Some of Dr. Willcox’ personal satisfaction in this accomplishment was diminished, however, when a group of Harvard mathematicians persuaded Congress to adopt a rival statistical formula for reapportionment. Never convinced of the validity of the “Harvard method,” he continued throughout the remainder of his life to perfect and advocate his own system, and to urge to apparently hopeless cause of reducing the size of the House. His last appearance before a Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing on this subject was in 1959 when he was ninety-eight.
  The role Walter Willcox played in national and international organizations can only suggest the nature and extent of his influence in the developing field of statistics. In 1892 he joined the American Statistical Association, becoming its president in 1912 and a fellow in 1917. In addition, he was instrumental in bringing the United States into effective membership in the International Statistical Institute, which he himself had joined in 1899. He served as the United States delegate to its session in Berlin in 1903, and to most of its subsequent biennial meetings in various capitals throughout the world until his final appearance at Paris in 1961. Having been a vice president of the Institute since 1923, he took the lead in reviving it after World War II, and served as its president at the first post war meeting, held in Washington, D.C., in 1947. From that time until his death he held the title of honorary president.
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  Although each of his four books—The Divorce Problem, A Study in Statistics, Supplementary Analysis, 1897; Derivative Tables, Twelfth Census, 1906; Introduction to the Vital Statistics of the United States 1900-1930, 1933; and Studies in American Demography, 1940—made a significant contribution, it was through his innumerable articles, letters to the editor, and personal written and oral communications that he exerted his surprising influence, not only in the fields of statistics and economics but in the general affairs of the nation. If his attention was habitually attracted by the 'facts,' he had an extraordinary instinct for the right facts and great persistence in calling them and the problems and injustices they represented to the attention of his fellow citizens. Characteristically he was one of the very first to study the economic and social conditions of our Negro citizens; and it has been widely recognized that the recent Supreme Court decision establishing the principle of equal representation in state as well as national government reflects his efforts and influence. Both the problems of world government and the United Nations and the affairs of Ithaca and New York State were for him serious preoccupations. When on the occasion of his one hundredth birthday he was asked to comment on his life, he astonished his audience by saying, “If I were to start all over again I think I would go into politics. I don’t think I would have been so successful at that profession, but I would have enjoyed it more.”
  In spite of his extensive professional interests and accomplishments and wide travels, the focus of his life, at least next to his family, was surely the University. Having come early enough to know most of the great personalities in Cornell’s early history and notably, all of its presidents from Andrew D. White to James A. Perkins, he had an insatiable interest in anything that pertained to the history, growth, or welfare of Cornell. From 1902-1907 he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, from 1916 to 1920 faculty representative on the Board of Trustees, and from 1931 Professor Emeritus.
  An inveterate attender of faculty meetings, he also sought and made informal occasions for faculty discussion. He took a major part in reviving the Faculty Club after World War II, serving as its first president and making a substantial donation to its library. It was in one of the club’s small dining rooms, most fittingly named the Willcox Room, that he met regularly twice a week with luncheon groups. He himself had founded one of these groups nearly forty years ago, and modeled it after a 'round table' which he had been invited to attend at the Library of Congress during his stay in Washington at the turn of the century. Although he always referred to it as the Becker luncheon group because, as he explained, he had begun it to serve as an occasion for Carl Becker’s conversation, it has long since been known to others as the Willcox group. Its members have included many of Cornell’s most distinguished citizens from Carl Becker to Liberty Hyde Bailey, Dexter Kimball, and Miss Francis Perkins, to mention a very few. We all, guests and new members, came to appreciate the unobtrusive skill with which the quiet figure of Walter Willcox drew out and directed the conversation.
  Walter Willcox was throughout his long life not merely a distinguished economist and citizen; he was a model of a nineteenth-century gentleman and scholar concerned with the fate of his fellow man. He managed the rare feat of keeping his interest up to date without relinquishing his hold on his original values. As nearly as any one man could, he seemed to embody the ideal around which Ezra Cornell and Andrew White had established the University."

Cornell Memorial Statement for Bertram Francis Willcox (July 11, 1895 — April 30, 1987)

"Bertram F. Willcox was born in Cascadilla Hall [https://tompkins.historyforge.net/buildings/2719] on the Cornell campus, July 11, 1895. He died in Ithaca at his home at 111 Kelvin Place, April 30, 1987, shortly before his ninety-second birthday.
  Bert was the son of Professor Walter F. Willcox, a distinguished long-time member of Cornell’s Department of Economics, and Alice E. Work Willcox. Following secondary schooling in Ithaca and at the Hill School, Pottstown, Pennsylvania, he entered Cornell in the fall of 1913. His college activities and honors included serving as editor-in-chief of the Cornell Era, and membership in Psi Upsilon Fraternity, Sphinx Head and Phi Beta Kappa. His A.B. degree was awarded in absentia in 1917, following his assignment to France for war service.
  Bert had promptly responded to the American Declaration of War on Germany in early 1917 by volunteering for military service, only to find that his eyesight did not measure up to minimum American military requirements. He was, however, accepted by the American Field Service and joined the ambulance corps. In mid-April he sailed for France on a submarine-infested transatlantic crossing that involved, as he wrote to his father, “just enough risk to add zest”. His initial assignment was for six months in the Ardennes Forest Sector near Verdun as an ambulance driver and 'sou-chef' for his unit. This was followed by an additional six months of service as a Red Cross Captain, headquartered in Paris.
  In the late spring of 1918 after French manpower needs led to a reduction in the physical standards for enlistment, he was accepted by the French army through the French Foreign Legion, and assigned to an artillery officers candidate school for three months of training. He was then posted to the 13th Regiment of the French Light Artillery as a junior officer (“Aspirant”) and had several months of combat service that ended with the Armistice. Following his French Army discharge, he joined the Paris staff of the American Secretariat to Negotiate The Peace.
  Upon his return to the United States, Bert decided to pursue a legal career. From 1919 to 1922 he attended the Harvard Law School, graduating cum laude and serving as president of the Harvard Law Review. There followed twenty years of law practice in New York City. From 1923 to 1928, he was an associate with the law firm of Hughes, Rounds, Schurman & Dwight, and its successors. He then organized his own Wall Street firm, Schurman, Wiley & Willcox, with two of his law school classmates and fellow associates in the Hughes firm. They were Jacob Gould Schurman, Jr., son of Cornell’s third president, and Alexander Wiley, who was to become his brother-in-law. In 1943 Bert transferred from private practice to government service, becoming a public member of the Appeals Committee for the National War Labor Board. His Labor Board assignment involved arbitrating appeals from regional boards throughout the country, many of which concerned wartime wage controls.
  In the spring of 1946, Bert happily and enthusiastically accepted an invitation to return to Ithaca as a member of the Cornell Law School faculty, teaching primarily in the fields of labor law and commercial transactions. He also served concurrently as a faculty member of Cornell’s New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He won rapid promotion to the rank of professor of law in 1948. He was the author of two editions of the widely used Cases and Materials on Commercial Transactions, published in 1951 in collaboration with Professor Robert E. Sutherland, and in 1953 with Professor Robert Baucher as an additional collaborator. In 1952 he was at the London School of Economics under a Fulbright grant and conducted research in labor relations in the nationalized gas industry. He was co-editor for two editions of Labor Relations and the Law, published in 1953 and 1960. He also actively participated as an arbitrator of labor-management disputes, serving on arbitration panels of federal and state agencies and as a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators.
  In 1954, Bert was appointed as the first holder of the newly established William G. McRoberts Research Professorship in the Administration of the Law. As McRoberts Professor, he made a number of notable contributions toward improving the administration of justice.
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  Bert retired from active teaching at Cornell in 1963, becoming McRoberts Professor Emeritus. He spent the next four years in India on a challenging project sponsored by the Ford Foundation that permitted him to continue teaching and research in the areas of labor law and labor relations. From 1963 to 1967, he served as visiting professor of law at the Indian Law Institute in New Delhi, and concurrently in 1966 and 1967 as a member of the law faculty at Banaras Hindu University at Varanasi. At the Indian Law Institute he worked in collaboration with a group of Indian legal scholars in preparing a pioneer Indian Case Book entitled Labour Law and Labour Relations, published in 1968.
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  Bert’s interests and contributions spanned a broad spectrum, covering both private and public law. In dedicating the 1963 fall issue of Law in Transition to Bert, the editors wrote: “To each of these segments of the law he has brought incisive analysis and high-minded principle. Achievement of sound public policy in defense of the weak or the humble is as much a part of his work on commercial transactions as on problems of public law.” Bert’s final Cornell sabbatic was spent in Europe studying the problems of world federalism and the legal and practical problems involved in attaining international peace. 
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  Having lived as a boy and young man on the campus, in the days when there were faculty homes on areas now occupied by the College of Engineering, Statler Hall, and other university buildings, Bert had a great store of personal memories of Cornell as it was in the first decades of the century. He related anecdotes, however, only when they were relevant to the topic under discussion. He had a keen sense of propriety and could never, even in his last years, be accused of 'anecdotage'.
  Bert was a devoted family member. He met his wife-to-be, Katherine Webster Leckie of Hamilton, Ontario, on a trip to Bermuda in 1930. Kay and Bert were married in 1934, and were happily destined to share forty-nine years of close married companionship until Kay’s death in 1983. They were blessed with three children: David born in 1935, Alice in 1938, and Mary in 1944. Bert and Kay had many interests in common. They both loved hiking, mountain climbing and the out-of-doors, enthusiasms they shared with their children. Furthermore during World War II, Bert and Kay opened their home to two English children who remained here throughout most of the War, safe from the threat of bombing at home.
  During Bert’s seventeen years of active Cornell teaching, his father Walter F. Willcox was still active as an emeritus professor at Cornell. When Bert joined him in the ranks of the emeriti, a classic picture of the two emeritus professors Willcox appeared in papers throughout the country, with a report stating that this was the only known case of a father and son contemporaneously holding emeritus rank at the same university."