Yale's anthropology program still maintained something of the evolutionary tradition of William Graham Sumner, a quite different emphasis from the historical particularism promulgated by Franz Boas at Columbia.
After completing the handbooks, Murdock and his fellow officers were sent to the Pacific as military government officials, serving for nearly a year in the administration of occupied Okinawa.
[7] Following Sapir's death, Murdock served as chairman of the Department of Anthropology from 1938 until 1960, when he reached the then mandatory retirement age at Yale.
Leaving his long-time residence at 960 Ridge Road in Hamden, Connecticut, Murdock moved with his wife to 4150 Bigelow Boulevard in Pittsburgh.
These are Murdock's own recollections, as shared with his classmates in the class of 1919 at Yale: Before war struck, I was preoccupied with the routines of academic life at Yale—teaching and research with their modest rewards, departmental administration with its headaches, pleasant extra-curricular associations with my colleagues.
The principal thrill was to observe (and participate in) the gradual upsurge by which Yale came to assume unquestioned leadership in the social sciences.
[...] I wrote a little, imbibed a little, played some tennis, arbitrated a motion picture dispute, and instituted a fairly ambitious project called the Cross-Cultural Survey but dubbed by the New York Times a 'bank of knowledge.'
On the advice of the intelligence experts of the Army and Navy I converted the Cross-Cultural Survey into a fact-gathering organization on the Japanese-held islands of the Pacific.
Early in 1943, when the military program in the Pacific began to accelerate, the Navy Department urged me to speed up the research of the Cross-Cultural Survey and made a very generous offer of financial support.
The last handbook, on the Ryukyu Islands, was (providentially) published just when it was decided to invade Okinawa, and I was sent out to Hawaii to join the staff of the Tenth Army in planning that operation.
[...] For two months, helped by one language officer, my job was to induce or drag the terror-stricken natives out of their mountain fastnesses into the coastal villages where we could house and feed them, give them medical attention, and get them back to a normal peacetime economy.
We stopped en route for three or four days each at Singapore, Colombo, and Cape Town, where we were welcomed by the residents and wined and dined by the Royal Navy.
[9] Murdock later served as chair of the American Anthropological Association's (AAA's) Committee on Scientific Freedom, established to defend anthropologists from unfair attacks.
He approached the Social Science Research Council and obtained the funding to establish an inter-university organization, the Human Relations Area Files, with collections maintained at Yale University (Whiting 1986: 684).
There is also a list of his other major works: In 1960, Murdock moved to the University of Pittsburgh, where he occupied the Andrew Mellon Chair of Anthropology.
He is buried in a military cemetery, Valley Forge Memorial Gardens, 352 South Gulph Road, King of Prussia, PA.