Willcox was a
Cornell University faculty member from 1891 to 1931. In his research on
divorce, he estimated that one in 12 marriages in the United States ended in divorce in 1909 and that if trends continued, approximately one in two marriages would end in divorce. He also published
Supplementary Analysis and Derivative Tables, twelfth census (1906). He contributed the "Negroes in the United States" subsection to the "Negro" article in the 1911
Encyclopædia Britannica. Between 1900 and 1910 he corresponded with
Alfred H. Stone of Mississippi, a cotton farmer and public official who became a race theorist who attempted to give a scientific basis to
prejudice and
white superiority. Willcox initiated the first
statistics course at Cornell in 1892, one of the earliest university courses in statistics in the United States, and one among 16 universities with such courses in the 1890s. His research interest was in vital statistics.
Emil Julius Gumbel described his body of work, collected in Studies in American Demography, as "the type of old-fashioned writings which will continue to be of value notwithstanding all progress achieved in mathematical statistics." In 1911, Willcox claimed there would be "no children in the United States under five years of age" by the year 2020. Perpetuating ideas of
race suicide, Willcox erroneously explained that the United States' birth rate meant that importing babies from France would be the only option for maintaining population levels. After serving as one of five chief statisticians for the
U.S. Census in 1900, Willcox proved that for any method of
apportionment that involves rounding, a priority list can be created by dividing the rounding point into each state's population, by which each seat can be assigned in successive order based on each state's priority listings. Willcox was an advocate for reducing the number of seats in the House of Representatives.
Alan Willcox (1901-1978), who served as general counsel to the
U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and
William B. Willcox (1907-1985) who was an academic historian. ==Selected publications==