Appalachian Figures
In early 1959 Harvard students opened their campus paper and met a new dean in a faculty profile titled “Governmental Engineer.” The article introduced Don K. Price Jr as a tall, friendly man whose voice still carried the gentle drawl of his native Kentucky, a veteran of New Deal agencies, wartime science boards, and the Hoover Commission who was only then settling into his first full time academic job. It also located his childhood in Middlesboro, “just north of the Cumberland Gap and Daniel Boone country,” a reminder that one of the architects of modern American science policy came out of a small Appalachian rail town near the Tennessee line.
This is the story of that journey. It runs from a Bell County family rooted in the Gap country to Oxford and Chicago, through war work in Washington and the drafting of Science The Endless Frontier, and finally to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and books that helped generations of scholars think about science, democracy, and power. Along the way it shows how an Appalachian upbringing shadowed a life spent at the center of the twentieth century American state.
Middlesboro Roots in a Gap Country Family
Don Krasher Price Jr was born on 23 January 1910 in Middlesboro, Bell County, Kentucky. The town had grown up in the late nineteenth century as a speculative iron and railroad center at the western mouth of Cumberland Gap, wedged between the Pine and Cumberland mountains. By the time Price was born the first boom had passed, but the streets around Cumberland Avenue still pulsed with mine traffic, trains, and travelers following the old Wilderness Road into and out of the mountains.
Genealogical records trace his parents, Don Krasher Price and Nell Rhorer, to a marriage in Bell County in 1907. They raised at least two sons in Middlesboro, Don and his younger brother Karl Rhorer Price. Karl’s Washington Post obituary would later describe him as a tax lawyer born in Middlesboro who, like his brother, went from Vanderbilt to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. The Prices were hardly the only family to send children away from the Cumberland Gap in search of higher education, but it is striking that both sons of this Bell County household followed the same route from the Yellowjackets of Middlesboro High School to the quads of Vanderbilt and then on to Merton College in England.
Later reminiscences in the Harvard Crimson capture how strongly Price still identified with that upbringing. In 1959 he described Middlesboro for the student reporter as lying just north of the Gap and what he called Daniel Boone country, a place where old migration routes, coal trains, and highway traffic all met. The image fits the larger pattern of his life. He would become a kind of institutional traffic engineer, thinking about how ideas, money, and authority moved through the crowded junctions of modern government.
Vanderbilt, the Tennessean, and a Road to Oxford
In 1927 Price left the Gap for Nashville, enrolling at Vanderbilt University. He majored in history and political science and took his bachelor’s degree in 1931. Even as an undergraduate he blended scholarship and public life. Biographical sketches and later profiles note that he worked as a reporter and then state editor for the Nashville Evening Tennessean around 1930 to 1932, learning the craft of explaining complex public questions to ordinary readers.
Winning a Rhodes Scholarship in 1932 carried him much farther from home than most Bell County boys ever traveled. He crossed the Atlantic to Merton College, Oxford, where he earned a second bachelor’s degree and then completed a B. Litt. His thesis compared the constitutional, administrative, and sociological roles of the British higher civil service with those of its American counterpart, an early sign of his fascination with what we might call the social machinery of government.
The Merton College Register and later reference works remember him as a Rhodes Scholar from Middlesboro, Kentucky who went on to serve as a key figure in American public administration. Even in those clipped entries the Appalachian origin remains part of the story.
City Manager Government and New Deal Reform
Price returned to the United States in the mid nineteen thirties intending, he later said, to keep pursuing journalism. The times pulled him toward the New Deal instead. He joined the Central Housing Committee and then the Social Science Research Council, where a traveling research project on city manager government sent him across the country studying how towns and small cities were reorganizing their local administrations.
Those field studies fed into two early books that made his reputation. City Manager Government in the United States: A Review after Twenty Five Years and City Manager Government in Nine Cities, published in 1940 and based heavily on interviews and reports from practicing city managers, documented how reformers tried to replace patronage ridden mayor systems with more professional, council appointed administrators. For Appalachian readers, the details lie mostly outside the mountains, in cities like Cincinnati and San Diego, but the questions were familiar. How should small communities balance local democracy with the need for technical expertise. How far could voters trust unelected managers to run schools, utilities, and police.
Settling in Chicago, Price spent much of the late nineteen thirties and early forties with the Public Administration Clearing House, editing and writing for Public Administration Review. One widely noticed article comparing British and American systems of government sparked a printed back and forth with British socialist Harold Laski, a debate that later made its way into Harvard government syllabi. The Middlesboro student who had once written for a Nashville newspaper was now arguing with leading European theorists about parliamentary versus presidential regimes.
War, the Coast Guard, and Science The Endless Frontier
World War II pulled Price into uniform in 1943. The Coast Guard brought him to Washington, where he worked in the office of the commandant designing procedures for the service’s wartime regulatory duties. That experience, combined with his Chicago years, taught him how federal agencies actually functioned under stress.
When the war ended he moved into the Bureau of the Budget, the predecessor of today’s Office of Management and Budget. There he helped draft legislation establishing both the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Science Foundation, stitching together scientific ambitions, security worries, and congressional politics. In J. Merton England’s official history of the NSF, a chapter on the making of Vannevar Bush’s report Science The Endless Frontier notes that a Coast Guard lieutenant detailed from the Bureau of the Budget, Don K. Price, worked with senior staff to polish and integrate committee drafts into the final document that went to President Truman.
Science The Endless Frontier has often been called the founding charter of the postwar American research state. It argued that the federal government should support basic science by granting funds to universities, that civilian scientists should enjoy a wide degree of autonomy, and that scientific progress was essential to national security and prosperity. Price’s quiet role in shaping that report and in shepherding early atomic energy and NSF legislation shows how a political scientist from southeastern Kentucky helped frame the institutional bargain that still governs American science.
Hoover, the Presidency, and the Research and Development Board
From the Bureau of the Budget Price moved to the first Hoover Commission, the postwar Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government. The Harvard Crimson’s 1959 profile describes him as personal assistant to former president Herbert Hoover on the section of the report dealing with the presidency and the executive branch, and notes that he played an important part in drafting key portions of the findings. The Hoover Commission’s recommendations on streamlining agencies, reorganizing the White House staff, and clarifying presidential responsibilities shaped the way the federal government operated in the Cold War era.
After the commission he returned briefly to Chicago, then came back to Washington as deputy chairman of the Defense Department’s Research and Development Board. There he wrestled with the problem that would define much of his later scholarship: how to fit scientists and engineers into democratic decision making. His 1954 book Government and Science: Their Dynamic Relation in American Democracy grew out of that experience. It examined the tensions between expert advice and elected authority in areas like atomic energy, defense research, and university contracting.
Historians of technology and science policy still cite Government and Science as a foundational text. NASA studies of space program politics, histories of the National Bureau of Standards, and surveys of the postwar “era of expertise” all lean on Price’s analysis of how federal funding and scientific autonomy changed each other after 1945.
Ford Foundation and the Founding of Harvard’s Kennedy School
The early nineteen fifties took Price out of formal government and into philanthropy. He served first as associate director and then as vice president of the Ford Foundation, helping guide grants that reshaped everything from international development to American higher education. Ford Foundation records and later scholarship on postwar philanthropy treat him as one of the central figures in what some call the “organizational synthesis” of American politics, the weaving together of federal agencies, universities, and think tanks into an increasingly dense policy network.
In 1958 Harvard recruited him as professor of government and dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration, the institution that would soon become the John F. Kennedy School of Government. For nearly two decades, until 1977, he built curriculum, hired faculty, and redesigned the school into a training ground for public officials from the United States and abroad. A 1995 Harvard Crimson obituary credits him with developing an early seminar on Science and Public Policy and with insisting that public administration students engage with engineering and systems analysis, reflecting his conviction that technical change and government organization could not be separated.
During those same years he served in a variety of national roles. Biographical notes and the National Academies’ Funding Health Sciences Research volume list him as a former president of the American Political Science Association, a vice president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a counselor to the Executive Office of the President from the Kennedy through the Nixon years. He sat on the Atomic Energy Commission’s Historical Advisory Committee for the official history of the Manhattan Project, lending a political scientist’s eye to the technical saga.
Through it all colleagues heard echoes of Bell County. The 1959 Crimson profile emphasized that his voice still carried a soft Kentucky drawl and framed him as a kind of engineer of institutions, shuttling between “straight government work” and organizations that studied government problems.
The Scientific Estate and America’s Unwritten Constitution
Price’s best known scholarly work appeared in the 1960s and 1980s. The Scientific Estate, published by Harvard University Press in 1965, argued that scientists and engineers had become a kind of new estate in American public life, comparable in influence to older institutions like the judiciary or the military. He warned that the growing authority of technical experts could widen the gap between specialized knowledge and democratic accountability, but he also insisted that modern government could not function without them.
Later historians of science and technology routinely flagged The Scientific Estate as one of the classic books on postwar science policy, often pairing it with Vannevar Bush’s Science The Endless Frontier. In Public Administration Review, W. Henry Lambright’s essay “Scientists, Truth, and Power” highlighted Price’s ideas as the starting point for understanding how scientific advice enters politics, noting again that the author had begun life in 1910 in Middlesboro and studied at Vanderbilt and Oxford before turning to these questions.
A 1966 chapter titled “The Agrarian Tradition and the New Science,” delivered at a National Research Council symposium on agricultural research, shows Price thinking explicitly about rural traditions and modern laboratories in the same frame. The published proceedings present him reflecting on the distance between a world of farmers and local communities and the emerging world of centralized research institutions and federal funding, a contrast that carries obvious Appalachian resonances.
In 1985 he returned to these themes in America’s Unwritten Constitution: Science, Religion, and Political Responsibility, published by Louisiana State University Press and later reissued by Harvard. There he explored the moral and intellectual assumptions that undergird American public life but never appear in statutory text, ranging from scientific rationality to religious belief. It reads, in some ways, like a late career meditation by a man who had spent fifty years watching scientists, bureaucrats, and elected officials negotiate the unwritten rules of power.
Oral Histories, Archives, and How We Know His Story
Much of what we know about Price comes from the papers he left behind and from interviews he gave late in life. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston holds the Don K. Price Personal Papers, a large collection of correspondence, memoranda, teaching materials, and policy drafts that cover his service in the Bureau of the Budget and Defense Department, his work with the Ford Foundation, and his years as dean of the Kennedy School.
Harvard University Archives maintains its own holdings of Price’s faculty files and administrative papers, including materials on curriculum, appointments, and committee work. Finding aids for the Pac to Put faculty archive guides list his collection alongside those of his contemporaries, a reminder that he was as much a university builder as a federal adviser.
At the Library of Congress, the Vannevar Bush Papers include correspondence with Price and references to his participation in key debates over federal research organization and Project Troy era information policy. Those letters tie him directly into the network of scientists and administrators who tried to forge a “new deal for research” after World War II.
Two oral history projects preserve his voice. The Hoover Institution’s Herbert Hoover Oral History Program recorded an extended interview with him on 20 July 1970, used by later scholars as a primary account of his work on the Hoover Commission and the evolution of executive branch organization. A decade later the American Political Science Association and Pi Sigma Alpha included him in their Oral History Project. The Kentucky Oral History Commission’s online catalog lists sessions with “Price, Don Krasher” from March and April 1980, which together form a long, first person narrative of his life in government and academia.
Finally, there are the biographical essays written by friends and colleagues. Richard Neustadt’s memorial piece “Don K. Price (23 January 1910 to 9 July 1995)” in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society combines personal recollection with a careful reconstruction of Price’s career, drawing heavily on their shared years at Kennedy School. Shorter memorials in the Boston Globe, United Press International, and Harvard’s own tributes underline the same points. Price, they say, was both a central figure in the national conversation about science and government and an unusually modest, decent man.
He died in Wellesley, Massachusetts on 9 July 1995 at the age of eighty five, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. His grave marker and Find A Grave entry list him, simply, as Don Krasher Price Jr of Middlesboro, Kentucky and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Why Don K. Price Belongs to Appalachian History
Price rarely wrote directly about Appalachia. His books focus on federal agencies, scientific institutions, foreign policy, and the ethical responsibilities of experts. Yet his life fits squarely into the region’s history.
First, he belongs to the long story of Appalachian out migration and education. Families across the mountains scraped together tuition and lobbied local school boards so that children could step onto paths that led out of the coalfields and hollow towns. Price’s route from Middlesboro High to Vanderbilt and Oxford is one of the most dramatic examples of that pattern.
Second, he complicates the usual images of Appalachian influence in national life. Many familiar figures from the region became symbols of protest, poverty, or cultural authenticity. Price became something different. He turned the perspectives of a small town Kentuckian into a way of thinking about administrative machinery, scientific power, and democratic accountability. In his work on Science The Endless Frontier, the Hoover Commission, the Research and Development Board, and the Kennedy School he helped design the framework within which later environmental, health, and technology debates took place.
Finally, he reminds us that Appalachian stories are not confined to miners’ shacks or courthouse steps. They also play out in committee rooms, faculty meetings, and quiet offices where someone with a Kentucky drawl is explaining how a memo should be worded or how a research agency ought to be structured. The boy from Bell County who once looked up at the ridgeline of Cumberland Gap spent his life trying to make sure that the powerful new “scientific estate” would serve a democratic republic rather than rule it. That is as much an Appalachian legacy as any coalfield ballad or courthouse speech.
Sources & Further Reading
Don K. Price Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Collection DKPPP with finding aid and catalog entry outlining his birth in Middlesboro, degrees from Vanderbilt and Oxford, and roles in the Bureau of the Budget, Defense Department, Ford Foundation, and Harvard. Kennedy Library+1
Harvard University Archives, “Harvard Faculty Personal Archives and Papers: Pac–Put” guide, entries for Don K. Price covering his deanship at the Graduate School of Public Administration and Kennedy School, teaching, and committee work. The Harvard Crimson+1
Vannevar Bush Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., including correspondence with Don K. Price and references to his work on postwar scientific organization and Project Troy. University of California Press+1
Herbert Hoover Oral History Program, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, interview with Don K. Price, 20 July 1970, collection XX028, box 19, covering his experience with the Hoover Commission and federal reorganization. Cambridge University Press & Assessment+1
APSA and Pi Sigma Alpha Oral History Project, interviews with Don Krasher Price, 1980, cataloged through the Kentucky Oral History Commission as “Price, Don Krasher” with sessions in March and April. Kentucky Oral History+1
Don K. Price, City Manager Government in the United States: A Review after Twenty Five Years and City Manager Government in Nine Cities (1940). Early field based studies of municipal reform and the city manager system. Oregon State Library Search+1
Don K. Price, Government and Science: Their Dynamic Relation in American Democracy (New York University Press, 1954). Classic treatment of the relationship between scientific expertise and democratic institutions, rooted in his work for the Defense Department’s Research and Development Board. Dokumen+1
Don K. Price, The Scientific Estate (Harvard University Press, 1965). Widely cited analysis of scientists and engineers as a new estate in modern politics, influential in histories of postwar science and technology. Naval History and Heritage Command+1
Don K. Price, “The Agrarian Tradition and the New Science,” in Symposium on Research in Agriculture (National Academies Press, 1966). Mid career reflection on the tensions between rural traditions and centralized research, available through the NAP online reader. NCBI
Don K. Price, “The Ethical Principles of Scientific Institutions,” 1979, in a science and society journal, exploring the moral obligations of research organizations and university based science. NCBI
Don K. Price, America’s Unwritten Constitution: Science, Religion, and Political Responsibility (Louisiana State University Press, 1985). Later synthesis on the unwritten moral and intellectual foundations of American public life, described in publisher materials and biographical notes for National Academies studies. NCBI
Richard E. Neustadt, “Don K. Price (23 January 1910 to 9 July 1995),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142, no. 1 (1998): 154 to 160. Authoritative memorial biography by a close colleague at the Kennedy School. JSTOR+1
“Governmental Engineer,” Harvard Crimson, 27 February 1959. Faculty profile tracing Price’s path from Middlesboro and Vanderbilt through Chicago, wartime service, the Hoover Commission, and the Ford Foundation to his new role as dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Public Administration. The Harvard Crimson
“Former K School Dean Dies,” Harvard Crimson, 11 July 1995, and “Former K School Dean, Law Prof., Fogg Director, Scholar Pass Away,” Harvard Crimson, 13 September 1995. Obituaries summarizing his career, noting his Middlesboro birth, Kennedy School leadership, and death from Alzheimer’s disease. The Harvard Crimson+1
“Don K. Krashcr Price,” Prabook biography, and “Don Krasher Price,” FamilySearch and Find A Grave entries, for basic genealogical data on his parents, Bell County marriage, siblings, and Middlesboro roots. Prabook+2FamilySearch+2
Karl Rhorer Price obituary, Washington Post, 1 February 1991, for confirmation of the Price brothers’ shared Middlesboro origin and Rhodes Scholar path through Vanderbilt and Merton College. The Washington Post
Secondary discussions of Price’s ideas and influence in works on postwar science policy, including W. Henry Lambright, “Scientists, Truth, and Power,” Public Administration Review (2009), NASA and NIST institutional histories, and studies of philanthropy and the “organizational synthesis” of American politics. Springer Link+3Wiley Online Library+3NIST Publications+3
Author Note: