Donald Beates Watt was born in Lancaster, Pa. , one of five children of Peter T. Watt and Laura L. Geiger. His father, a Scottish immigrant, was cofounder of the Watt and Shand Department Store in Lancaster, His mother raised Watt with religious zeal, and the Presbyterian Church and the YMCA were important influences on his developing value system. Watt took an early liking to outdoor activities; he started camping at the age of eight and hiking at twelve.
After attending public schools in Lancaster, Watt went to the Lawrenceville School (1908 - 1912) in New Jersey. While there, he directed the school summer camp for underprivileged boys. At Princeton University majoring in psychology from 1912 to 1916, Watt underwent a change in his religious mind-set, from a strictly literal belief in the Bible to a greater understanding of it as history and poetry. During his college years he traveled to Europe for the first time. Upon his graduation, he served in the British-Indian army in Mesopotamia (Iraq) as a YMCA secretary. From 1916 to 1919, as a lone American among British and Indian troops, Watt learned to adjust to European and Asiatic customs.
During World War I, his job was to make the troops as comfortable as possible. To that end, Watt organized social and religious activities for the soldiers. After the war, he traveled across the deserts of Persia. He felt at home in unusual and distant places. Upon returning to the United States, Watt went to work as treasurer for a family enterprise, a cement factory near Catskill, N. Y. With the sale of the cement company, Watt began graduate study in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1924. Watt then spent three years at the University of Pennsylvania and at Yale University. Despite failed preliminary examinations for the Ph. D. , he went to Germany in 1926 to study German. During this summer vacation, he spent one month in a German home and a second month hiking in the mountains. This experience foreshadowed the pattern he would adopt for his bold educational experiment. When Watt returned to the United States, he accepted a post to organize and head a student personnel department at Syracuse University. He led a group of college students on a hiking tour of France, Germany, and Switzerland. When the Great Depression struck in 1931, Watt was asked to take a leave of absence from his post at Syracuse. He went to New York City, where he took a volunteer job with the Inquiry, a group of sociologists in the YMCA and YWCA movements who studied group dynamics and the discussion method. This group refined and developed communication based on consensus. Using personal experience, small groups worked together with a skilled leader on solving a specific problem, in a setting conducive to fruitful discussion. In 1931, Watt and two colleagues from the Inquiry went to Geneva to study the methods used in the summer schools conducted by the League of Nations Societies. They were unsuccessful in their attempts to persuade the League societies to use the discussion method. However, out of this failure emerged the plan for the Experiment in International Living. The first experiment, designed to create sympathetic understanding across national lines, sought to bring fourteen teenage American boys together for one month with an equal number of European boys. The experiment was designed to give American youth an opportunity to live in European homes and to share the outdoor life of Europeans. Watt's first prospectus outlined the purposes: To learn, by living and thinking with them, how French and German boys live and think; to make friends among them by being a friend to them; to make a real beginning of speaking one of their languages; to visit places of cultural and historical importance. Despite the depression, a group of twenty-three boys participated in the first experiment in 1932 in Switzerland. After this, Watt felt committed to make mountain climbing an important feature of the experiment summer. Other changes were made in succeeding years. The group camp was eliminated and the home stay instituted. Visitors were to speak the language of their hosts. Visitors and hosts were to live together for two months; the first month in a home, the second traveling in the host country. Females were included in the second year. Watt listened to experimenters. His seriousness of purpose was reflected in constant reexamination and changes in the program. To find young experimenters for the second-year program, Watt embarked on a three-month trip to visit independent schools. During the early years of the experiment, he and his wife were the salespeople and the office staff. The second experiment (1933) in Germany proved controversial because of the rise of Nazi power. From the third experiment on, groups went to France. There were strong objections to overcome. For example, Watt was told by one authority, "The French do not take strangers into their homes. " Watt, undeterred, prevailed in his search for French homes. Similar obstacles were overcome in southern Italy, Latin America, Mexico, and Nigeria. In each instance, Watt was challenged to find people willing to join the experiment. Each year, the numbers of people the experiment served and the geographical area it covered grew. In 1937, Watt moved from Syracuse to Putney, Vt. The experiment program was incorporated in 1942 and became codified in a series of publications, including, among others, leaders' and experimenters' handbooks. As the experiment grew, Watt found natives to represent the different countries involved. These nationals became the experiment directors and attended general international meetings. By the time Watt retired, the experiment had grown considerably to include the School for International Training, established in 1961. Today, the school offers degrees in international studies and has trained more Peace Corps volunteers than any university. Still at its core is the central idea that people learn to live together by living together. Learning by experience in the home of another national is basic to effective education for international understanding, Watt believed. He died in Lancaster.
In Catskill, he met and married Leslie Somers, the sister of the local Presbyterian minister's wife, on March 25, 1922. They had three children.
