Joseph W. Eaton Collection

Joseph W. Eaton was born in Nuremberg (Nürnberg), Germany, 28 September 1919, as Josef Wechsler, the son of Jacob Wechsler and Flora Wechsler (née Goldschmidt). His parents had married in Frankfurt am Main in 1912. In Nuremberg Eaton's father owned a shaving brush factory. When the business failed following the stock market crash, the family moved to Berlin, in 1930. Eaton had three siblings, all brothers: Siegfried (Shlomoh; born 1913), Martin (Moshe; born 1915), and Herbert (Yitzchak; born 1921).

After the ascent of the National Socialists (Nazis) to power in Germany in 1933, Eaton's family began to look for ways to emigrate, but they could not afford to do so as a family. Joseph's two older brothers left for Palestine, and Joseph and his younger brother, Herbert, emigrated to the United States with the help of the German-Jewish Children's Aid program. (Herbert eventually settled in Israel.) Eaton's parents later fled to the Netherlands; they were deported from there, and died in Sobibór in July 1943. Eaton's maternal grandmother, Cilli Goldschmidt (née Hamburger), of Frankfurt am Main, died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943.

Joseph Wechsler arrived in New York in November 1934. By 1941 he had changed his last name to Eaton. All of his brothers also took the new name of Eaton. (One brother, Herbert, later went back to using Wechsler.) According to Joseph Eaton, they changed their name in connection with their service in the armed forces on the side of the Allies during World War II (three of the four served either under the Americans or the British), out of concern for the safety of their parents, who were living at the time in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

Joseph Eaton graduated from Cornell University in 1940 with a major in sociology. Following the entrance of the United States into the Second World War, he attempted to enlist in the U.S. Army but, since he was German-born, he was classified as an enemy alien and rejected. However, in 1943, while pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University he was nevertheless drafted, and, thanks to his language skills, was selected to work as a journalist in the psychological warfare unit of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), in which position his duties included writing leaflets to be disseminated behind enemy lines.

As a soldier, Eaton was in a unit that occupied Aachen, the first German city to be taken by the Allies, in October 1944. In 1945-1946, while stationed in Straubing, near Regensburg, he was the editor of a weekly newspaper, the Regensburger Post, published by the Army for the German civilian population of Bavaria.

After the war Eaton returned to Columbia, and completed his Ph.D. in sociology in 1948. On 8 July 1947 he married Helen Fay Goodman (born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, 1925), at Shearith Israel synagogue, in New York City. Helen Eaton was a speech therapist by profession. The couple had four children: David, Seth, Jonathan and Deborah.

Eaton spent most of his professional career at the University of Pittsburgh. He was appointed professor of Social Work Research there in January 1959, and shortly later held a joint appointment at the Graduate School of Public Health. As of 1974 his appointment was moved to the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, where he remained until his retirement in December 1989.

Early in his career, Eaton was a co-author of an epidemiological study of the mental health of the Hutterite community. His subsequent scholarly interests were often related to social work, comparative social systems, and social economic planning and development. Sometimes working in collaboration with Israeli scholars, he published articles and books on Israeli society concerning topics such as prison reform; youth culture; and educational and social services for disadvantaged groups.

In summer 1980 Eaton spent six weeks as an exchange scholar in East Berlin, in a program sponsored jointly by the American Academy of Sciences and the Akademie der Wissenschaften, of East Germany, with Wulfram Speigner acting as the liaison at the German institute. He researched three topics, on which he wrote reports: Communist social science methodology; Jews in East Germany; and sociology in East Germany. During his stay he became acquainted with the author Stefan Heym.

In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eaton returned to Germany and pursued conversations with Jews who had participated in the Communist system, visiting Gregor Gysi and Hermann Axen, among others.

Another of Eaton's scholarly interests related to national identity card systems and privacy issues, a topic on which he published a book in 1986, Card-Carrying Americans: privacy, security, and the national ID card debate (republished in 2003 as The Privacy Card: a low cost strategy to combat terrorism).

At the end of his life Eaton lived in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburg, where he died 15 October 2012, at the age of 93. He is buried at Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Adelphi, Prince George's County, Maryland.

References

Rotstein, Gary (2012 October 19). "Obituary: Joseph Wechsler Eaton, University of Pittsburgh professor, author fled Nazi Germany." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Tabachnick, Toby (2012 October 16). "Joseph Eaton was professor of social work, committed Zionist." The Jewish Chronicle.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Joseph Eaton" [biographical notes accompanying photographs donated by Eaton]. USHMM Photo Archives (http://digitalassets.ushmm.org/photoarchives/).