Our History
The Population Association of America (PAA) was conceived on December 15th, 1930 at a meeting in the office of Henry Pratt Fairchild at New York University.
The PAA was an offshoot of the American National Committee of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) which had been formed in 1927 with Raymond Pearl of The Johns Hopkins University as its first President.
The PAA was officially organized at a meeting on May 7th, 1931 at the Town Hall Club in New York City, attended by 38 people, including the first President of the PAA, Henry Pratt Fairchild, and several subsequent Presidents–Louis Dublin, Frederick Osborne, and Warren Thompson. Margaret Sanger was also in attendance, but Osborne suggested that she not be put forward as an officer of the organization because the PAA desired to have a scientific focus, rather than an activist orientation.