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Henry Carter Adams, 1851-1921.
Henry Carter Adams was an early American economist, one of the forerunners of the American Institutionalist school.
Henry C. Adams was born in Dearborn, Iowa. Descended from among the earliest English Puritan settlers of Massachusetts, Adams's father Ephraim Adams, a Congregationalist missionary, had been one of the earliest European settlers in Iowa territory. He was tutored at home by his father, before proceeding to Grinnell College (which his father had founded), from which he graduated in 1874. He proceeded to enroll in Andover theological seminary, intending to take up the ministerial life. But he soon changed his course and decided to study economics, which he believed was essential to understanding morals and social reform.
In 1876, Adams entered graduate study at the newly-founded The Johns Hopkins University. In 1878, Adams became the first Hopkins student to receive a Ph.D. for an economics thesis on the history of US taxation. He subsequently undertook a two-year study tour of Germany, imbibing the lessons of the German Historical school. It was in Berlin where Henry C. Adams met Andrew D. White, and persuaded him to appoint him to a lectureship that would introduce economics at Cornell University in 1879. Adams split semesters teaching at Cornell and Johns Hopkins until 1881, when he began splitting his time between Cornell and Michigan.
From his dissertation onwards, Henry C. Adams quickly emerged as a prominent public finance economist - his Public Debts (1887) and Science of Finance (1898) becoming textbooks in the field. Although conservative in some respects, Adams parted ways from contemporary American apologists by his criticism of laissez faire, calling for regulation of the railroads and the legalization of trade unions. Jointly with Ely, Adams was one of primary forces behind the creation of the American Economic Association in 1885. His 1887 article on state regulation, contributed as an AEA monograph, was a pioneering classic in the field. He was later elected president of the AEA in 1896.
Adams was forced out of Cornell in 1887 because of his "radical" opinions (Adams identified his 1886 Scientific American article on labor, an impromptu speech during the heat of the Gould railway strike, as the cause of his dismissal). Adams subsequently became a full professor of political economy and finance at the University of Michigan in 1888, where he remained until his death. During part of this time, from 1887 to 1911, Adams took up the job of head statistician at the Interstate Commerce Commission (for which he would deliver several statistical reports on railways and public utilities, emphasizing the indispensability of state collection of corporate accounts and statistics for proper regulation; his reflections compiled later in his 1918 book). Towards the end of his life, Adams composed an economics textbook with an Institutionalist emphasis for use in high schools (1918).
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