Louise Overacker | |
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| Born | (1891-11-18)November 18, 1891 Centreville,California |
| Died | April 26, 1982(1982-04-26) (aged 90) |
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| Awards | John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship |
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| Doctoral advisor | Charles Edward Merriam |
Louise Overacker (November 18, 1891—April 26, 1982) was an Americanpolitical scientist. She specialized in the study of money in politics,United States presidential primaries, and comparativeparty systems, particularly those of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. She was one of the first professors to teach government atWellesley College, where she was a faculty member from 1925 until 1957, and helped to establish the Wellesley Department of Political Science in 1940.
Overacker was born in Centreville (nowFremont), in theEast Bay area aroundSan Francisco,California.[1] Her father owned a fruit growing business, but he later became a rancher, and the family moved toSt. Helena, California, where Overacker attended high school.[1] In 1911, she was admitted toStanford University, which had opened the same year she was born.[1] However, the school had limited women's attendance to only 500 at a time, and Overacker arrived in her first semester to discover that they had exceeded the cap and she was forced to return home.[1] Enough women had dropped out by the start of the second semester that Overacker was able to attend, and she graduated successfully in 1915.[1] She earned a BA in economics, with honors fromPhi Beta Kappa.[1]
Overacker continued to study at Stanford with the political scientist Victor J. West, and she earned an MA in 1917 with a thesis entitledThe Police Department of San Francisco.[1] DuringWWI, Overacker worked as a clerk in theBureau of War Risk Insurance within the United StatesBureau of Efficiency.[1] After the end of the war, she traveled around Europe with theYMCA to assist with administration there, before returning to Stanford in 1919. In 1920, she was offered a position as an instructor atVassar College, which then had only one other political science instructor.[1] Two years later she moved to theUniversity of Chicago to obtain a PhD. There she studied withCharles Edward Merriam, and graduated in 1924. Her thesis focused on the study of American presidential primaries.[1] According toVictoria Schuck, Overacker was one of only 19 women to complete a PhD in political science during the 1920s, out of about 200 political science degrees awarded during that period.[1]
Overacker was offered a faculty position by the head of the political science department at theUniversity of Indiana, but the position was vetoed by the university because the only available office would have to be shared with a man.[1] Instead she obtained a position atWilson College inPennsylvania where she was an instructor in both government and economics for a year.[1] In 1925 she moved toWellesley College where she became an assistant professor in the History Department.[1]
Overacker was one of the first professors to teach political science at Wellesley, 15 years before a dedicated political science department was established there.[2] Wellesley College has credited Overacker with playing a leading role in introducing a serious concentration on political science into the Wellesley history department, as well as in the subsequent founding of the political science department in 1940.[2] Overacker helped to give the new political science department an early focus on practical topics likebureaucracy andgovernment administration, in response to the academic disruptions caused byWWII.[1][2]
Together with her former PhD supervisor Charles Merriam, Overacker published the 1928 update and revision of Merriam's 1926 book onPrimary Elections.[3] When her former undergraduate advisor Victor J. West died in 1927, Overacker was invited to compile his lectures and notes into a book, which she published under the titleMoney in Elections in 1932.[4] In 1945, Overacker was invited byBoston University to deliver theGaspar G. Bacon lecture series; Victoria Schuck wrote that it was rare for a woman to be invited to deliver a named lecture series at that time.[1] She chose to deliver lectures on the topic of campaign finance in America, and her lectures were compiled and published in the 1946 bookPresidential Campaign Funds.[1] Overacker also studied how theGreat Depression affected the sources and quantities of funding for presidential campaigns, as well as research on the political activities of labor unions as campaign funding sources.[5] Because of Overacker's early work on the topic ofcampaign finance, she was chosen by the Citizen's Research Foundation as one of the namesakes for their Overacker-Heard Campaign Finance Data Archive, later maintained by theInstitute of Governmental Studies at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.[6]
In 1951, Overacker was awarded theJohn Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.[7]
In 1952, Overacker publishedThe Australian party system.[8] The book aimed to increase American interest in the party politics of Australia, specifically the relationship between theAustralian Labor Party, the parties of the center-right, and theCommunist Party of Australia.[9] As a scholar of the American presidential primary system, Overacker was particularly interested in the pre-selection process in Australian presidential politics, which she viewed as the closest foreign analogue to American presidential primary elections.[1]The Australian party system was one of the first investigations of Australian politics available to American political scientists, even though Australia had several distinctive features such as the combination of aWestminster system with an American-style single constitutional document, together withcompulsory voting.[10]
Overacker retired from Wellesley in 1957, 32 years after her first appointment there.[2] After her retirement, she held several temporary academic positions. She was theJohn Hay Whitney Visiting Professor atBethany College inWest Virginia during the 1957–1958 school year, a visiting scholar for Phi Beta Kappa from 1958 to 1960, and a substitute professor during 1960–1961 at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles when a professor there was named chancellor of TheUniversity of California at Santa Cruz and had to leave to lay out the new Santa Cruz campus.[1] In 1963, Overacker taught at theInter-American University inPuerto Rico.[1]
Before Overacker's death in 1982, theAmerican Political Science Association had been preparing a special symposium in her honor.[1] Overacker's influence on the early development on the discipline of political science has been noted political scientists, journalists, and university presidents like Victoria Schuck,Elizabeth Drew, andNannerl O. Keohane.[1] In citing her work,Robert Caro referred to Overacker as her "era's leading academic expert on campaign finance".[11]
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