Bailey, William Bacon

WILLIAM BACON BAILEY

  William Bacon Bailey, professor of practical philanthropy at Yale University, to which professorship he was appointed in 1916, and also agent of the Organized Charities Association of New Haven since 1911, is regarded as an authority upon many lines of practical reform and of practical benevolence. He was born May 7, 1873, in Springfield, Massachusetts, a son of William Leonard and Ellen Henrietta (Bacon) Bailey. The father was born in Agawam, Massachusetts, in 1842, and the mother in Granville of the same state, in 1840. During the later years of his life William L. Bailey engaged in the real estate business. He was a descendant of one of the old families of Springfield, Massachusetts, and many of the collateral branches settled there in 1636. Two boulders were recently placed in Springfield in memory of two famous Indian fighters, both of whom were ancestors of Professor Bailey of this review. The family comes of English, Scotch, and Scotch-Irish ancestry.

  In the acquirement of his education William Bacon Bailey was graduated from the Williston Seminary with the class of 1890 and won his Bachelor of Arts degree at Yale College in 1894. Two years later the Doctor of Philosophy degree was conferred upon him by Yale University and in 1897 he was instructor in economics at Yale. In 1905 he was made assistant professor of economics in Yale College and from 1916 to the present time has been professor of practical philanthropy in Yale University. He has carried his investigations and researches far and wide into the realm of sociology, economics and of politics inasmuch as political enactment has to do with the conditions of the various classes in which he has been so deeply interested. Since 1911 he has acted as agent of the Organized Charities Association of New Haven and he is also president of the Connecticut State Prison Association, is chairman of the board of directors of the Connecticut State Farm for Women, is chairman of the social hygiene committee of the Connecticut Society of Social Hygiene, and is a director of the Connecticut Society of Mental Hygiene. He is also editor in chief of the quarterly publications of the American Statistical Association. His investigations and researches have covered the widest scope having to do with crime and poverty and the remedy for such conditions. Another field of his activity is indicated in the fact that he has been president of the Covington Trust Association since its organization in 1902.

  On the 15th of June, 1905, in Syracuse, New York, Professor Bailey was married to Miss Sheila MacKenzie Jewett, a daughter of John Howard and Sarah (Phelps) Jewett. Her father was for twenty-five years business manager of the Worcester Gazette and is the author of about twenty books for children. Professor and Mrs. Bailey have a daughter, Dorothy, born October 26, 1909.

  The parents are members of College Chapel and Professor Bailey has membership in the Union League and also with Beta Theta Pi. In politics he maintains an independent course and has never been an aspirant for public office, serving only as supervisor of the census of the state of Connecticut in 1910. He is well known as a writer, being the author of three volumes written along the line of statistics and sociology, while many articles of a similar nature that he has penned have appeared in the leading magazines of the country.
 
 

Modern History of New Haven
and 
Eastern New Haven County

Illustrated

Volume II

New York – Chicago
The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company 
1918

pgs 878 - 879

 
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NEW HAVEN 
COUNTY BIOGRAPHIES
pages / text are copyrighted by
Elaine Kidd O'Leary &
Anne Taylor-Czaplewski
May 2002