Everett D. Hawkins Papers

Everett Day ("Red") Hawkins, son of Lewis Everett and Amelia Thompson (Day) Hawkins, was born in Orange, New Jersey on May 10, 1906. After graduating from high school in New Orleans in 1924, he entered Oberlin College. From 1927 to 1929, between his junior and senior years, he taught English as a "Shansi Representative" of Oberlin College in Taigu, Shansi Province, China. There, Hawkins developed his life-long interest in the culture and economic development of Asia. Hawkins received the B.A. degree in 1928 and completed his post-Shansi year at Oberlin in 1930. He pursued graduate work in Economics at Princeton University, earning the A.M. degree in 1933 and the Ph.D. degree in 1934.

Hawkins' teaching career spanned thirty-six years. In 1935, he joined the faculty of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where he was active in the Four-College Asian-African Studies Program. Following World War II, Hawkins helped to establish the Mt. Holyoke Institute on the United Nations. In 1961, Mt. Holyoke awarded Hawkins a Mary Lyon Professorship, its highest academic honor. He spent a semester during 1962-63 as a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and subsequently accepted a permanent appointment to the university's economics faculty. At Wisconsin, Hawkins served as Chairman of the East Asian Area Studies Committee (1964-68) and on numerous university committees, including the International Studies and Programs committee and the Inter-University Planning Committee on Southeast Asia. From August 1968 until January 1970, he was in the Philippines and Indonesia in conjunction with Wisconsin Programs. Hawkins held visiting professorships at the following institutions: the California Institute of Technology (1940-41); the University of Massachusetts (1954-55); and Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia (1958-59).

Hawkins' years in the academy were frequently interrupted by brief terms of government service. During his graduate school days at Princeton, he served as Consultant on dismissal compensation to the Federal Coordinator of Transportation (1933-35), and during World War II, he worked as a Price Controller in the Office of Price Administration (1942-44) . From 1944 to 1946, Hawkins was Director of Information for the U.S. Office of War Information in Chungking, China. With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1951, Hawkins went to Jakarta, Indonesia as the first Economic Adviser and Program Planning Officer for the Economic Cooperation Administration. While there, he helped to set up the first field research project in economics with graduate students at Gadjah Mada University. In 1953, he returned to Washington as chief of the Indonesian branch of the Asian division of the State Department. Three years later, under a grant from M.I.T., he went to Indonesia to study the batik industry. He spent the year 1963-64 as a consultant for the Ford Foundation, prior to taking up the post at Madison. After only six years on the Wisconsin faculty, Everett Hawkins died of a stroke in 1970. He was 64 years old.

Hawkins was the author of numerous publications, including Voluntary and Compulsory Plans for Dismissal Compensation (Princeton, 1940) and Entrepreneurship and Labor Skills in Indonesian Economic Development (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1961). His articles and reviews relating to international and development economics appeared in Monthly Labor Review, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, American Economic Review, Far Eastern Quarterly, Current History, and World Politics.

In 1937, Everett Hawkins married Ruth Baird, a faculty member of Mt. Holyoke College and graduate of Wellesley College. They were divorced in 1944. In 1951, he married artist Kathleen Muriel Greenwood (B.A. University of British Columbia 1933; A.M. Mt. Holyoke 1957). There were no children from either marriage.

Sources Consulted

Alumni Register (Oberlin: Oberlin College, 1960).

Carlson, Ellsworth, Oberlin in Asia: The First Hundred Years, 1882-1982 (Oberlin: Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association, 1982).

Student Files of Everett Hawkins and Harold Ingalls (28).

Note written by Valerie S. Komor.