Sydnor Harbison Walker was a budding labor economist who became an important grants administrator/manager with the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and later the Rockefeller Foundation. Her 1926 Columbia University dissertation was on the economics of social work, which like home economics, provided an academic harbor within economics for not a few women economists of the time.
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Life of Sydnor Harbison Walker
Born: 26 September 1891 in Louisville, Kentucky.
Parents: Walter and Mary Sydnor Perkins Walker.
1913. A.B. from Vassar with honors
Taught English and Latin at private schools in Louisville, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
1917. M.A. University of Southern California.
1917. Poughkeepsie City director listing as “assistant Vassar College”.
1918-19. Poughkeepsie City director listing as “instructor Vassar College”.
1919-21 [ca.]. Philadelphia.
Personnel work at Scott Company in Philadelphia [where she met Beardsley Ruml, see below].
Personnel work at Strawbridge & Clothier in Philadelphia.
1921-23. American Friends Service Committee.
One year of relief work in Vienna
Followed by one year in Russia with the American Friends Service Committee.
1924-1929. Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund.
Recruited by Beardsley Ruml as “research associate” in June 1924.
1926. Economics Ph.D. from Columbia University. Henry Seager, principal adviser.
Dissertation published: Social Work and the Training of Social Workers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1928.
1929-1943. Rockefeller Foundation (absorbed the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund in 1929).
1933. Promoted to associate director
1934. Sydnor H. Walker, “Privately Supported Social Work,” in Recent Social Trends in the United States, ed. President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: Whittlesey House, 1934), pp. 1168-1223.
1937. Appointment to acting director of the Social Science Division.
1939. Voted to the board of trustees of Vassar. Resigned October 1942 due to illness.
1941. October. Contracted a spinal infection, involving a paralytic illness that “permanently confined her to a wheel chair”. She had been elected to be president “of a prominent woman’s college” but the illness forced her to decline the honor.
1943. Resigned from the Rockefeller Foundation.
1945. Edited a volume for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, New York City. “The first one hundred days of the atomic age, August 6-November 15, 1945”.
1948. Appointed assistant to Sarah Blanding, president of Vassar.
1958. Retired from Vassar.
Died: 12 December 1966 in Millbrook, New York, leaving a bequest of $10,000 to Vassar College.
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Walker’s principal biographer
Amy E. Wells. Considering Her Influence: Sydnor H. Walker and Rockefeller Support for Social Work, Social Scientists, and Universities in the South. pp. 127-147. Chapter 5 in Andrea Walton (ed.). Women and Philanthropy in Education. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
_________. Sydnor Harbison Walker. American National Biography Online. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
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Vassar Memorial Minute
Walker, Sydnor Harbison, 1891-1966
Miss Sydnor Harbison Walker, Vassar alumna, faculty member, trustee and Assistant to the President, died December 12, 1966, at her home in Millbrook, New York, at the age of 75. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of Walter and Mary Sydnor Perkins Walker.
After attending Louisville schools, Miss Walker came to Vassar and was graduated in 1913 with honors. Economics was her major interest and she returned to Vassar to teach it in 1917, with an M.A. from the University of Southern California. Professor Emeritus Mabel Newcomer, a young colleague at the time, writes that “her quick wit and gaiety made her well liked among students in the residential hall where she lived ….. as a teacher she exhibited these same qualities, combined with clarity of thought and expression …. although she could be sharply critical of the careless and the dilatory.”
In 1919 Miss Walker decided that she needed some practical experience and went to work for a pioneering firm of industrial relations consultants where she wrote their weekly news letter. Three members of this young firm became college presidents and some years later Miss Walker herself was on the way to the presidency of a prominent college for women. A fourth member of the firm was Beardsley Ruml.
In 1921 Miss Walker engaged in the relief work of the American Friends Service Committee, first in Vienna and later in Russia. In a letter to President Emeritus MacCracken, she vividly describes her experience.
“We are now feeding about 15,000 a week through our depots, and we are supplying clothing to nearly 3,000. Our work is done on an individual case basis, which we think to be the soundest, not only from a social point of view, but because we believe that method essential for the creation of a spirit of international good-will — at no time a secondary object in our program… In addition to the feeding and clothing…. we are teaching mothers to care for their babies through the welfare centers; we are supporting a score of hospitals and other institutions for children; we have restocked farms with poultry and cattle and are helping farmers to build up permanent food resources for the city; and we are assisting materially in such constructive Austrian enterprises as the building of suburban land settlements and the creation of a market abroad for the art work of many gifted persons…we feel that we are a real part of the life of the city and not a superimposed group of relief workers.”
It is not hard for those who knew Miss Walker to visualize her presiding over relief work in the Imperial Palace of the Hofburg, whose stately corridors were cheerless and deserted save for these activities.
Returning to America in 1924, Miss Walker combined her interests in industrial relations with social welfare and education by becoming a research assistant at the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund in New York. In the meantime she received her doctorate in economics from Columbia University in 1928 with a dissertation on “Social Work and the Training of Social Workers.”
When the Rockefeller Foundation absorbed the Spelman Fund in 1929, Miss Walker began her association of twenty years with the Foundation. She moved from the research department to the position of Associate Director of the Social Sciences Division and finally became its Acting Director. While there she developed a program of international relations involving considerable travel in Europe and South America in very responsible positions. In 1933 she collaborated in the preparation of the report of President Hoover’s Committee on Social Trends, contributing a chapter entitled, “Privately Supported Social Work.”
In 1939 Miss Walker was proposed for trustee of Vassar College by the Faculty Club and she was elected by the board. Again quoting Miss Newcomer, “her contribution as a Vassar trustee was very real….Her experience on the faculty and as a student, and her current work in the Rockefeller Foundation, had given her a real understanding of the problems of the college and enabled her to offer constructive criticism and suggestion for change.”
Her resignation as trustee occurred in October 1942, and came because of a crippling illness which led eventually to her permanent confinement to a wheel chair. A friend and fellow alumna described her long battle against mistaken diagnoses, official predictions of helplessness and the end of her career.
“Sydnor simply rejected the idea of permanent immobility…. for a person who never knew what fatigue meant, who never could understand inactivity, either mental or physical, nothing could have been more tragic than paralysis.”
When Miss Walker realized that complete recovery was impossible, on her own initiative she went to one of the first rehabilitation clinics in New York and learned to help herself to a remarkable degree. Also she wrote, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation published in 1945, a report entitled “The First Hundred Days of the Atomic Age.”
In 1948 another opportunity to serve Vassar came to Miss Walker when Miss Blanding named her Assistant to the President. She returned to live in Metcalf House and became an active participant in Vassar’s development. Miss Blanding knew her as “a brilliant woman who never lost her zest for life nor her interest in things of the mind. She was a voracious reader and stimulating companion.”
After Miss Walker’s retirement in 1957, she bought a large colonial house in Millbrook, reminiscent of her native Kentucky. There she continued her vital interest in Vassar and in the many friendships she had made throughout her rich and colorful life.
Respectfully submitted,
Josephine Gleason
Clarice Pennock
Verna Spicer
Winifred Asprey, Chairman
Source: Online collection published by Vassar College Libraries. Faculty meeting minutes: XVIII-334-336.
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From The Rockefeller Foundation: A Digital History.
Sydnor H. Walker worked with the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) and the Rockefeller Foundation’s (RF) Division of the Social Sciences, helping to shape research in the social sciences over the course of two decades.
Walker was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1891. She received an A.B. in economics from Vassar College in 1913 and an M.A. from the University of Southern California in 1917.
She returned to Vassar in 1917, where she served as an instructor in economics. A colleague commented that Walker was appreciated by the students for “her quick wit and gaiety…although she could be sharply critical of the careless and the dilatory.”[1] In 1919 Walker left her teaching position to join an industrial relations consulting firm headed by Beardsley Ruml. She subsequently went abroad to Vienna and Russia to aid in European relief with the American Friends Service Committee.
Upon her return to the U.S. in 1924, Walker was recruited by Ruml to work for the LSRM as a research associate. She was a staunch advocate of using scientific and standardized methods to conduct research in the social sciences. While working for the LSRM, Walker continued her studies at Columbia University, receiving her Ph.D. in economics in 1928. Her dissertation, “Social Work and the Training of Social Workers,” was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1928.
When many of LSRM’s programs were consolidated with the RF in 1929 and a new Division of the Social Sciences created, Walker became Assistant Director of the division. She was promoted to Associate Director in 1933 and Acting Director in 1937. Among her interests at the RF, she was a proponent of improving the teaching of social work and the administration of social welfare programs. Her grant-making extended to many southern universities. She also contributed to the development of the social sciences outside the U.S., working with grantees in Europe and Latin America.
Resigning from the RF in 1943 for health reasons, she worked on a report for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, “The First Hundred Days of the Atomic Age,” which was published in 1945.
She served as a trustee for Vassar College from 1939-1943 and was appointed assistant to the president of Vassar College in 1948, a position she held until 1957.
Sydnor H. Walker passed away in 1966. Former Vassar College President, Sarah Blanding, called her “a brilliant woman who never lost her zest for life nor her interest in things of the mind.”[2] Her officer diaries are available to researchers at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) and additional papers are in the Biographical Collection at the Vassar College Libraries.
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[1] Josephine Gleason et al. “Sydnor Harrison Walker: A Memorial Minute,” Vassar Faculty Meeting, December 1966, Biographical Files Collection, Vassar College Archives, Vassar Libraries.
[2] Gleason et al.
Source: Webpage, The Rockefeller Foundation: A Digital History. People/Sydnor H. Walker. Also the source for the portrait of Sydnor H. Walker used above.