[1] He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1926 and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1929.
[2][3] In 1943, botanist R.A.Howard named a genus of flowering plants from Australia, (belonging to the family Stemonuraceae) as Irvingbaileya in his honour.
[4] In 1945, at the request of a dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, he created what became known as the "Bailey Plan", which controversially suggested that all sectors of botany should be unified.
[5] In World War I, Bailey worked for the Bureau of Aircraft Production at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.
During World War II he worked on a camouflage project at the Engineers' School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.