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This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon Carver and Frank W. Taussig published works in which they established a close nexus between an individual’s economic position and his biological fitness. Carver, writing in 1929, argued that social class rigidities are attributable to the inheritance of superior and inferior abilities on the respective social class levels and proposed an “economic test of fitness” as a eugenic criterion to distinguish worthy from unworthy individuals. In 1932, Taussig, together with Carl Smith Joslyn, published American Business Leaders – a study that showed how groups with superior social status are proportionately much more productive of professional and business leaders than are the groups with inferior social status. Like Carver, Taussig and Joslyn attributed this circumstance primarily to hereditary rather than environmental factors. Taussig, Joslyn, and Carver are not the only protagonists of our story. The Russian-born sociologists Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin, who joined the newly established Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930, also played a crucial role. His book Social Mobility (1927) exercised a major influence on both Taussig and Carver and contributed decisively to the survival of eugenic and hereditarian ideas at Harvard in the 1930s.

Chester Whitney Wright (1879–1966) received his A.B. in 1901, A.M. in 1902 and Ph.D. in 1906, all from Harvard University. After teaching at Cornell University during 1906–1907, he taught at the University of Chicago from 1907 to 1944. Wright was the author of Economic History of the United States (1941, 1949); editor of Economic Problems of War and Its Aftermath (1942), to which he contributed a chapter on economic lessons from previous wars, and other chapters were authored by John U. Nef (war and the early industrial revolution) and by Frank H. Knight (the war and the crisis of individualism); and co-editor of Materials for the Study of Elementary Economics (1913). Wright’s Wool-Growing and the Tariff received the David Ames Wells Prize for 1907–1908, and was volume 5 in the Harvard Economic Studies. I am indebted to Holly Flynn for assistance in preparing Wright’s biography and in tracking down incomplete references; to Marianne Johnson in preparing many tables and charts; and to F. Taylor Ostrander, as usual, for help in transcribing and proofreading.

In the years following the publication of A Theory of Consumption (1923), Hazel Kyrk’s book became the flagship of the field that would later be known as the economics of consumption. It stimulated theoretical and empirical work on consumption. Some of the existing literature on Kyrk (e.g., Kiss & Beller, 2000; Le Tollec, 2020; Tadajewski, 2013) depicted her theory as the starting point of the economics of consumption. Nevertheless, how and why it emerged the way it did remain largely unexplored. This chapter examines Kyrk’s intellectual background, which, we argue, can be traced back to two main movements in the United States: the home economics and the institutionalist. Both movements conveyed specific endeavors as responses to the US material and social transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, notably the perceived changing role of consumption and that of women in US society. On the one hand, Kyrk pursued first-generation home economists’ efforts to make sense of and put into action the shifting of women’s role from domestic producer to consumer. On the other hand, she reinterpreted Veblen’s (1899) account of consumption in order to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda focused on “wise” and “rational” consumption. This chapter studies how Kyrk carried on first-generation home economists’ progressive agenda and how she adapted Veblen’s fin-de-siècle critical account of consumption to the context of the household goods developed in 1900–1920. Our account of Kyrk’s intellectual roots offers a novel narrative to better understand the role of gender and epistemological questions in her theory.

Major concern over monopolies and trusts was one of the distinguishing marks of the American Economic Association from its foundation and lasted well into the early 1900s (Coats, 1960). The failed merger attempt of the Northern Securities Company and the subsequent panic of 1902–1903, the 1907 financial crisis and its aftermath, as well as the ostensibly illegal financial practices of many conglomerates, all contributed to keep the trusts issue alive on academic circles. But it was only after the 1911 Court decisions that the debate on the trust problem and the necessary measures to amend the existing antitrust legislation acquired new vigor and incisiveness.³

Correspondence and other materials pertaining to Selig Perlman may be found especially in Archival Volume 8 but also in Volumes 4 and 18B. Perlman was the author of a major history and a psychologically rich interpretation of labor and trade unionism in the United States (A History of Trade Unionism in the United States, New York: Macmillan, 1922 and Theory of the Labor Movement, New York: Macmillan, 1928). Published below, thanks again to the generous cooperation and permission of his son, Mark Perlman, is further correspondence, principally from Selig Perlman to his former student, Ben Solomon Stephansky.

Walter Lippmann is widely acknowledged as the Father of modern American Journalism and one of the most profound public thinkers of the twentieth century. Though he extensively corresponded with economists, political philosophers, political scientists, and statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic, Lippmann’s interest in political economy has only come under serious academic investigation within the last 20 years. When Lippmann has been explored in the history of economic thought, he has generally been considered to be a propagator and popularizer of others’ ideas rather than a serious theorist in his own right, particularly his role in spreading Keynesianism as one of the early supporters of the New Deal. This chapter directly challenges this dominant interpretation on two fronts. First, it acknowledges and explores Lippmann’s role as a contributor to the economic discourse of his time. Second, it challenges categorizing Lippmann as a Keynesian by highlighting the closeness of many of his ideas to the Austrian school of thought. It accomplishes this by giving a holistic view of Lippmann’s thought, not only in the Great Depression and New Deal Era, but how he evolved from a student sympathetic to socialism at Harvard in 1910 to a theorist concerned with epistemological problems of good political, social, and economic order. The development of Lippmann’s thought in this broader lens parallels much of the work of Hayek, Mises, and others during this period, and presents rich new research opportunities for both modern Austrian economists as well as historians of economic thought.

Warren J. Samuels, who died on August 17, 2011 at his home in Gainesville, Florida, was the founding editor of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology. The current editors had planned to include a note regarding Samuels’ initiation of the research annual in the first volume that did not include his name among the editors on the masthead. Unfortunately, that volume is also the one in which we must memorialize him. The history of economics community has lost one of its leaders; the editors of this research annual have lost the sure hand of their mentor and guide.

The purpose of this paper is to document contributions to the early study and teaching of marketing at one of the first universities in Britain to do so and, in that way, to contribute to the literature about the history of marketing thought. Given that the first university business program in Britain was started in 1902, at about the same time as the earliest business programs in America, the more specific purpose of this paper was to explore whether or not the same influences were shared by pioneer marketing educators on both sides of the Atlantic.

An historical method is used including a biographical approach. Primary source materials included unpublished correspondence (letterbooks), lecture notes, seminar minute-books, course syllabi and exams, minutes of senate and faculty meetings, university calendars and other unpublished documents in the William James Ashley Papers at the University of Birmingham.

The contributions of William James Ashley and the Commerce Program at the University of Birmingham to the early twentieth-century study and teaching of marketing are documented. Drawing from influences similar to those on pioneer American marketing scholars, Ashley used an historical, inductive, descriptive approach to study and teach marketing as part of what he called “business economics”. Beginning in 1902, Ashley taught his students about a relatively wide range of marketing strategy decisions focusing mostly on channels of distribution and the functions performed by channel intermediaries. His teaching and the research of his students share much with the early twentieth-century commodity, institutional and functional approaches that dominated American marketing thought.

William James Ashley was only one scholar and the Commerce Program at the University of Birmingham was only one, although widely acknowledged as the first, of a few early twentieth-century British university programs in business. This justifies future research into the possible contributions to marketing knowledge made by other programs such as those at the University of Manchester (1903), University of Liverpool (1910) and University of London (1919).

This paper adds an important chapter to the history of marketing thought which has been dominated by American pioneer scholars, courses, literature and ideas.

Muchof this volume of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology considers the contributions made by Warren J. Samuels to economic methodology, law and economics, and the history of economic thought. A brief biographical profile of Samuels is provided in the Volume 30A this year. Samuels established the A volume of RHETM as a place for longer articles, detailed book reviews, and other documents that did not fit into the standard journal article format. Later, the B and C volumes were created to preserve and publish archival document. Samuels remembers that “a goodly number of items…[were] given to me by Ed Witte in May/June 1957 when he was trying to lighten his load as he retired; I graduated [at] the same time…the original obstacle I faced was that some of our teachers and students [were] fearful of embarrassing themselves. I can assure you that this problem has not materialized” (Samuels by email, May 18, 2011).