Walter A. Wyckoff

Walter Augustus Wyckoff lived forty-three years and was for nine a member here. Born in India, of missionary parents, educated in part among the children of British officials, and graduated from Princeton in 1888, his opportunities for the study of mankind were further enlarged by two years of extended travel over the habitable globe. His genius, however, was intensive rather than extensive and his most memorable feat was that, for eighteen months, he travelled as few scholars have done; accomplishing a journey ever notable for hardship, courage, and success, the journey of a tramp laborer from Atlantic to Pacific, across the continent and back again. Abandoning home and friends, with a single shabby suit on his back, and not a penny to his name, he set out to support himself by hard labor, to learn the lives of the toilers, to make a basic study from experience of the hand workers, untrained and unskilled, over this broad continent. From the fierce, exacting task he never flinched. In the three volumes he published, his results are given. They were noted as contributions to economics so important that each of two universities offered him a chair. He naturally preferred his alma mater, and there he lived and taught and wrought for the rest of his short life. He was not only a lover of mankind but of men: his social gifts endeared him to all the select who knew him; his high principle and sterling character made him a bulwark in the community; to the inner circle of his intimate friends his loss was irreparable. He was often with us, appreciated the stimulating companionship he had here and, cosmopolitan as he was by training, it was in the community of his university and in metropolitan life that he found his chiefest appreciation and pleasure.

William Milligan Sloane
1909 Century Association Yearbook