ABSTRACT
The period 1930 to 1944 was one of stress for both Americans and Canadians: rst, the Depression, then World War II (Miyanishi 2014). Most ecologists taught in academia, and during the Depression many young men (and some of the few young women who aspired to attend institutions of higher education) lacked the nancial resources to pay tuition. That situation changed during World War II because the military services decided that it was important to educate some of their new personnel, and because wartime government expenditures had pulled the economy out of the Depression. (During the 1930s, my father taught physics at a small college [Louisburg in North Carolina] and was paid partly with meals at the college cafeteria. After the war began, Duke University hired him to teach engineering to students in uniform.) Ecology could hardly ourish during these years. The ESA membership had grown slowly but steadily until 1929, when it ceased to grow, and it actually contracted from a high of 645 to 546 by 1934 (Figure 2.1).
