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Jeremiah W. Jenks, 1856-1929.
American Institutionalist economist and political scientist at Cornell.
Born and raised in St. Clair, to a devout Congrgationalist family in rural Michigan, Jeremiah Whipple
Jenks obtained his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1878.
Jenks subsequently became a classics literature teacher at Mount Morris College in
Illinois. Jenks was soon saddled with teaching political
economy classes at Mount Morris, which he had never studied, but his interest in the topic was
piqued. Jenks spent several years teaching at Mount Morris,
interrupted only by a brief period studying law in Port Huron.
Eventually, like many of the "new generation",
Jenks proceeded abroad for graduate study in
Germany. He obtained
his doctorate at the University of Halle under the German
Historicist Johannes
Conrad in 1885, with a dissertation on the
American economist Henry C. Carey.
After returning to the United States, Jenks moved to Illinois, and taught high school in
Peoria, before being picked up by Knox College in 1886. In 1889, Jenks became
professor of economics and social science at Indiana University in Bloomington. In 1891,
Jenks was appointed professor of "political, municipal and social
institutions" at Cornell
University, bringing along his former Indiana student, Frank A.
Fetter as instructor. Jenks presided at
Cornell for the next twenty years, with frequent interruption to serve
on a variety of official US commissions in Washington, DC.
Interested in the political side of economic issues, Jeremiah Jenks wrote many studies and reports on trusts, currency, labor and immigration. A Progressive by political stripe and a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Jenks was placed as an expert on trusts and industrial combinations in the celebrated Industrial Commission in 1899 which produced a massive multi-volume report on the state of US industry and business (1900-02). He also wrote a report on trusts for the US department of labor in 1900. Jenks's reports would serve as the backdrop for Roosevelt's campaign of trust-busting. In 1901, Jenks was appointed to serve as a special US commissioner for the Far East, going on to travel around Asia and investigate the economic institutions in British and Dutch colonies, so as to advise the new American colonial policy in the Philippines. In 1903, Jenks was appointed by Roosevelt to head a commission of international exchange to establish a gold exchange system for silver-using Mexico and China and the Philippines. In 1907, Roosevelt appointed Jenks to head the commission on immigration.
In 1912, Jenks left Cornell to become head of the Alexander Hamilton Institute in New York, and subsequently took an appointment in the department of government at New York University.
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