Academic Economics in America

Beginnings

First dedicated course of lectures on economics was delivered at William & Mary in 1790s, by James Madison (no, not the US president, but rather James Madison, Bishop of Virginia, president of Wm & Mary).

Up until the latter part of the 19th C., the curriculum of American colleges and universities were still very archaic, geared towards the education of clergymen, dominated by a classical curriculum derivative of the Oxbridge model, where next-to-no modern subjects were taught.  An undergraduate degree consisted primarily of three mandatory years of Classics (Greek and Latin, incl. ancient literature, ancient history, logic, etc.), plus 'Rhetoric' (English grammar and composition, pre-law) and Mathematics (Euclid, trigonometry and later algebra and some physics), with dabs of theology and Biblical studies. There were almost no electives. Only in the final year were senior students given a generic "moral philosophy" course, traditionally taught by the college president himself, covering ethics, law and politics, to inculcate finishing students with a general outlook on man and society.  This was designed to "top off" the education of gentlemen-students, the future civic and political leaders of the state. 

Some economics was often taught as part of this final year course, but it wasn't very deep. The overall purpose was just to inform students what the "correct" positions on economic policy every proper gentleman should hold (e.g. laissez faire good, socialism bad). The exact positions indoctrinated depended on the political proclivities of the powers-that-be, that is, the trustees, and it varied from state to state (some free trade, others protectionist; some for hard money, others flexible money). Not that the trustees dictated the content of the final year course, but they would hire college presidents that usually reflected their outlook. Most colleges being clerical training grounds, there was, of course, a very religious tinge from the start - e.g. free markets are God's order, "invisible hand" as "Divine hand", etc.

There had been many pushes throughout the 19th century to "modernize" the curriculum, and introduce modern subjects more systematically, like modern history, geography, modern languages, natural and experimental sciences (geology, chemistry, biology, etc.) and, yes, economics, but it was generally resisted. Would-be reformers pointed to the 'modern' curriculum of the Scottish academies, or the French Grand Ecoles, and especially the German research universities, but most American universities stuck with the Oxbridge curriculum. As a rule, they only hired tutors in Latin, Greek and mathematics. If allowed, modern subjects were often segregated as occasional electives or restricted to graduate courses, so as not to interfere with the main education of undergraduates.

The push for reform began early. Thomas Jefferson, who was enamored with the modern French Grand Ecoles, set up West Point and the University of Virginia from scratch, consciously on that model. Jefferson originally envisaged economics as part of a dedicated school of politics, taught by a professor, and fantasized about luring Jean-Baptiste Say to Virginia to fill that chair. But it was nixed, and economics lectures at Virginia were assigned to the professor of law, and when he refused to teach it, to the professor of moral philosophy (George Tucker). Ex-Virginian Thomas Cooper, a chemistry professor, and subsequently president of South Carolina College (future USC), taught the first serious dedicated course on economics at South Carolina during his presidency (1820s). The theologian Rev. Francis Wayland taught it as part of the final year moral philosophy lectures while president of Brown (Rhode Island) in the 1820s-40s, and produced the first American college textbook on the subject as a result.

The first professor to be given "economics" in his title was Rev. John McVickar, who was hired in 1817 by Columbia as professor of moral philosophy, and "political economy" was added to his title in 1826. But he was not a modernist - McVickar was dedicated to the traditional classical curriculum, and taught everything (classics, theology, rhetoric & belles lettres, ethics, history and, yes, economics as part of senior year course).  Harvard introduced their first dedicated economics lectures in 1853, as part of the final year course, and assigned it to the philosopher Francis Bowen ("professor of natural religion, moral philosophy and civil polity").

So the general pattern up until the mid-19th is detectable: college presidents taught it as part of the generic final year course, and in some cases outsourced it to a dedicated senior professor in moral philosophy.

While a few lectures in a final year course may seem sparse, keep in mind that actually American colleges were exposing their undergraduates to more economics than many other countries at the time. English universities, although having dedicated professors of political economy earlier (e.g. 1816 at Cambridge, 1825 at Oxford), kept it apart, lectures went largely unattended (if given at all) and so the average English student was entirely ignorant of it. In France, you'd have to be in the law school to come into contact with it. In Germany economics was found both in the law school and in the "philosophy" school (i.e. school of arts), in a special course called "cameralistics" (covering public finance, administration, etc.), but German students specialized early, so not everybody took it. In the US, every senior student had to take the final year course, so everyone was exposed to at least some lectures on economics.

Nonetheless, the method of instruction was also not deep or flexible. Bulk of the lectures were not really lectures, but just consisted of reading passages out loud from a textbook, often Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, or Francis Wayland's compedium of Ricardian writers. Recitation and rote repetition was still the pedagogic method of choice.  The American "clerical economists" loosely adhered to British Ricardian Classicism and its laissez faire tenets (although some were proponents of "American System" protectionism).

Reform experiments

Now, it was evident, as the 19th C. advanced, that Oxbridge-based education at American colleges was basically backwards and inadequate. Would-be reformers, who had seen "modern" schools in Europe, placed strong pressure to modernize curricula. Local business communities, who often supplied some trustees and hired the graduates, were sympathetic to the reformers, but the clerical-dominated professoriat and administration would have none of it. So reformers joined forces with businessmen to set up "experiments" outside.

One of the first such experiments was NYU, established in 1831, on the modern non-denominational model of London's UCL, with backing from the New York finance and merchant community (whose relationship with exlusionist episcopalian Columbia was often toxic). Another was the Rensselaer Institute in Troy, NY, established for engineering and technology in 1835, in imitation of the French ecoles.

A more famous experiment was the University of Wisconsin, established in 1848 by the Wisconsin legislature as part of a state-wide educational system, notionally on the high-minded principle of "public service". But it was unclear what that meant exactly, and so its curriculum for years merely followed the only curriculum they were aware of - the Oxbridge model of the Ivy League. A similar problem plagued the University of Michigan, founded a bit earlier, and would plague other state universities founded later.  The Wisconsin experiment revealed an underlying problem with reform: however much State charters talked about wanting to make university education "useful" and for "public service", the truth of the matter is that a classical education remained the "entry ticket" into the American elite. The ambitious sons of Midwestern farmers did not want to learn practical agricultural science, they wanted to get off the farm, learn Greek and Latin, and move up the social ladder. A "modern" university which didn't offer the classical route was widely seen as pointless.

Still, the reformers kept at it, and deepened their connections with businessmen and especially manufacturers, who were more consciously aware of the need to keep up with recent developments in science (esp. chemistry, physics). They joined in the pressure and pledged private money to fund modern schools. While private money was irresistible, existing university authorities had no intention of letting modern subjects infect their undergraduates.

Both Harvard and Yale relented enough to allow business money to found two modern schools in the 1850s - the "Lawrence Scientific School" at Harvard and the "Sheffield Scientific School" at Yale. But they kept them strictly segregated from their main colleges. The students were separate, the courses were separate, the degrees separate (B.Phil & Ph.D. from the scientific schools vs. B.A. & M.A. from the main colleges). Most importantly, the funding was separate - Scientific Schools subsisted mainly on student fees and private donations from the business community, and did not draw from the general university fund. In short, the scientific schools were effectively freelance lectures given in New Haven and Cambridge, and had relatively little to do with the main university itself other than borrowing the brand.

The scientific schools curriculum was not exclusively technical nor overly specialized. The label "scientific" was a generic euphemism for "modern". The objective was not to turn out only professional engineers and scientists, but broadly-educated people that went into many professions. The reformers took hold of the scientific schools as a showpiece of how a modern curriculum could work. The clerics at the main college tolerated it so long as it was segregated away.

Scientific schools developed showpiece general courses covering the range of modern subjects mentioned above (natural and experimental sciences, modern history, geography, modern languages, English literature, etc.) Economics was just one part of the "Select Course" of Yale's Sheffield School developed by Daniel Coit Gilman in the 1860s. When Gilman's example was ignored, and he was passed over for the Yale presidency, he resigned and headed to California (see below). Gilman's successor at Sheffield in 1872 was Francis Amasa Walker, the dean of American economics, and one of the first persons in the country to hold the title of "Professor of Political Economy" exclusively. But, to reiterate, that had nothing to do with Yale itself. Yale president T.D. Woolsey still lectured the final year course at Yale college until 1871, then William Graham Sumner (a Biblical scholar and professor of Greek & ancient History) took over the economics lecturing and made it is own. Through the 1870s, Sumner did the economics lectures at Yale College, while Walker taught in the Sheffield ghetto. Different schools, different students, the two had nothing to do with each other.

Columbia did not enter the "scientific school" game, but it actually went further in 1857 with the introduction of an "elective year", where senior students could choose to forego classics in favor of either science or jurisprudence. Economics and history was to be included under the latter, and Columbia brought in Francis Lieber that same year for the purpose. German-born Lieber was an economics enthusiast, and had been Cooper's successor at South Carolina. Lieber came to Columbia as professor of History and Political Science, taking over the economics courses away from moral philosopher McVickar. Lieber tried to expand the economics course, making it more frequent, but things ended flat. The 1857 reforms were reversed, the elective year abolished by 1861, and Lieber himself removed in 1865 by incoming president Barnard. Everything went back to how it was before, with economics falling under the final year moral philosophy course, now assigned to moral philosopher Charles Nairne (who didn't much care for economics, and primarily taught English literature, Rhetoric, etc.)

Morrill Act

A great watershed was the Morrill Act of 1862, when the US government assigned federal money (more specifically, grants of federal land, which could be sold for cash) for the establishment of schools for "agricultural and mechanical arts".  Specifically the maintenance of "at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanical arts, in such a manner as the legislature of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life."  There was no exact formula on what that meant. Congress's notional idea was to improve American industry and agriculture by putting farmers and machinists in touch with modern scientific principles. But it did not have to be narrowly technical - the Morrill act specifically noted that classics and other fields did not have to be excluded. Some reformers saw this as an opportunity to design an entire university from scratch, without any constraints. But they would be disappointed.

How the Morrill money was used varied by state. The Morrill act specified 30,000 acres of federal land per senator or congressman, so more populous states got more money. But proposals had to be submitted within five years. Many states used them to erect public universities (e.g. University of California in 1868). Others created new appendages (e.g. the College of Agriculture at Wisconsin). Massachusetts split its money - 70% went to found a Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst (future UMass), while 30% went to fund a new polytechnical school (M.I.T.). New York State originally toyed splitting the money, but eventually (persuaded by reformist A.D. White) put it all into raising one new university - Cornell University in 1865.

The curriculum of the new universities was still very unsettled. For many new universities, not knowing better, the formula used was still the traditional classical one, where economics only popped in as part of the final senior year. The new Morrill-created state universities looked to the older state universities (Wisconsin, Michigan) for tips, and that is still how it was done. Through the 1860s and 1870s, economics was taught at Wisconsin by the president John Bascom as part of "mental and moral philosophy", while at Michigan, economics was taught by president James B. Angell in a final year together with international law (semesters alternated).

Morrill-created  University of California (Berkeley) got a little more complicated because California state politics got very heavily involved. In the original stages, designed by the State's elites, California followed the classical model simply because they did not know better. But in 1872, they hired Gilman from Yale's Sheffield school as California president. Gilman finally thought he had the opportunity to design his ideal modern university from scratch (much like his reformer friend A.D. White did with Cornell). But then the political winds changed, and coalitions of farmers and artisans pushed the legislature and demanded that the university jettison all the non-practical courses and become an exclusively "agricultural-and-mechanics" school. They imposed a State-appointed Board of Regents on the university, and Gilman resigned. Things in California continued in uncertain state for years thereafter. Future agrarian socialist leader, Henry George (then an newspaper editor in San Francisco, who had led the charge against the elitist design) would soon put in a bid as professor of political economy (in preparing his candidacy, George wrote up the notes that would become Progress and Poverty).

The new narrow technical colleges, like M.I.T., fate was a little different. There was pressure, for quite some time, that MIT should be merged with Harvard's Lawrence School, and become the science and engineering branch of Harvard. This was resisted by MIT's president and faculty. But that meant they had to come up with a wider set of courses on their own, and give their own students a background in the humanities and social sciences. (The underlying notion was that churning out engineers was not enough; the engineers were supposed to be hired by the private sector, and move up the career ladders which would eventually place them in management and upper level positions where they would need more than just their technical skills.) So MIT actually hired one person (William Parsons Atkinson) to do all the non-science teaching for many years. Atkinson did not do classics, but essentially modern history, modern languages, English literature, ethics, law, politics and yes a dab of economics. These were all lumped together in what was called "Course IX" (still the common nickname for decades). Originally obligatory for all MIT students, Course IX later became optional and the only non-science specialization at MIT for a long time.

In sum, up until the 1870s, despite the experiments and the Morrill act, little had actually changed. Although there were now some special schools with modern curricula, the main colleges were still married to their classical curriculum. Classics dominated, and the only economics was delivered by presidents (or their moral philosophy proxies) in the generic final year course, and that was it. Many of the new state universities created by the Morrill Act merely replicated that formula, or remained in a state of flux.

It is only in the 1870s that things began to really change. And even then, only slowly.

1870s Changes

The main influence for change in the 1870s was three factors.

(1) Firstly, that undergraduate students were now older - whereas previous to the Civil War, they had enrolled in college at fifteen or so, they now began to enroll later, and thus the pedagogic value of the classical education, with its mental and moral training for teenagers, were no longer seen as vital for 18- and 19-year-old adults. University authorities gradually began to recognize that specialization in electives was more useful for their futures than a tour-de-force of ancient classics.

(2) Secondly, the enrollment of women in coeducational land grant and other colleges broadened the student base. A narrow mandatory classical education seemed less appropriate for young women. Moreover, the influx demanded more courses and more teachers, which afforded the opportunity to create more elective courses (Michigan, Cornell and Boston went co-ed by 1879; Berkeley co-ed by 1870)

(3) Thirdly, the arrival of the "new generation" of American scholars, who had gone for graduate training in Germany, and came home looking for positions. German-trained Americans began as a trickle in the early 1870s, but turned into a flood by the 1880s. Again, American universities were only hiring tutors in Greek, Latin and mathematics, even in the new Morrill colleges. The new generation of teachers put pressure for change.

The leading reformers of the 1870s had done earlier tours of Europe and were eager to introduce the modern German education model into the US. Now older and nearer positions of power, many ascended into university president positions and made common cause with the new generation. The leading names are well known - presidents Daniel Coit Gilman (Hopkins), Andrew Dickson White (Cornell), Charles W. Eliot (Harvard), etc.

Some pinned their hopes on change from within, others in the blank slate opportunities offered by the Morrill Act. When these proved too resistant, they turned to the Gilded Age tycoons - Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Rockefellers, etc. to make new homes for them.

Andrew Dickson White showed the way by roping in Ezra Cornell's Western Union fortune and New York State's Morrill money into creating Cornell University back in 1865. It took a while to get economics organized. Cornell initially started with a moral philosopher (William Dexter Wilson) delivering the economics dose in the fourth year, before White finally got around to hiring their first economist (Henry Carter Adams) in 1879. Adams is notable for being the first Ph.D. in economics to come out of Johns Hopkins.

The Johns Hopkins University, founded 1876 with B&O railroad money, was the brainchild of ex-Sheffielder Daniel Coit Gilman, after his ignoble evacuation from Berkeley. Hopkins was the first German-model research university, with advanced undergraduate and graduate degrees. At Hopkins, economics was still together with history in a joint "Department of Moral and Historical Sciences" for many years. (This was not a mere relic - the "Historicist School" of German economics, in which the new generation was trained, saw economics, politics and history as integral; the leading Hopkins teachers - economist Richard T. Ely and historian Herbert Baxter Adams - worked together like two gloves.).

While Hopkins could be just have become another experiment, and prospectively meet a similar ignoble fate as the scientific schools, Hopkins changed the dynamics by quickly pumping out a generation of well-trained American economists, ready to be hired in colleges across the country. At a time when new Morrill colleges were finding their footing and trying to grow, or existing colleges looking to add courses to meet the influx, a "reserve army" of Hopkins graduates were ready and available.

As mentioned, Hopkins granted its first Ph.D. in economics in 1878 to Henry Carter Adams. But Hopkins had been pipped to the punch by Harvard, which gave its first Ph.D. for an economics topic in 1875 (to Stuart Wood). Indeed, Harvard had spearheaded the reform period of the 1870s with the appointment of MIT chemistry professor Charles W. Eliot as Harvard's new president in 1869. Eliot transferred the modernization lessons of fledgling MIT to Harvard. Eliot took economics away from the wide-ranging moral philosopher Bowen, and appointed Harvard's first dedicated professor of economics, Charles Dunbar, in 1871. Eliot went on to hire a couple more economists a few years later as Dunbar's assistants (Silas MacVane, J. Laurence Laughlin).

The emergence of Johns Hopkins proved fatal for Yale's Sheffield School. Through the 1870s, Francis A. Walker (at Sheffield) and W. G. Sumner (at Yale College) had been dueling for the economics crown in New Haven. Initially, economics was supposed to be contained in Walker's Sheffield ghetto. But W.G. Sumner changed that. Despite his traditionalist background, Sumner turned out to be an economics enthusiast and reformist gnat and pushed the Yale administration into expanding the scope of economics and social sciences at Yale College. He even got a couple of German-trained assistants by the late 1870s (H.W. Farnam and A.T. Hadley - even though they originally hired as Greek & Latin tutors, they were soon teaching "optional" courses on economic topics). This took away some of the specialness of Walker's Sheffield. Nonetheless, Walker continued to fight for resources and harbored the fantasy of turning Sheffield into the country's foremost school of economics. Looking beyond New Haven, Walker wanted Sheffield to be where people across the US, interested in a civil service career, or involved in social reform movements, or high school and college teachers wanting to improve their own teaching, could come for special training. The emergence of Johns Hopkins in the late 1870s, fulfilling precisely that role and mopping up all such students, killed that dream. Walker quit Sheffield in 1880, and went on to become president of MIT (after Walker, Sheffield's scope declined and it since became a merely Yale's school of engineering; economics, under Sumner, become firmly established in Yale college).

Although the first Columbia experiment back in 1857 had failed, it was ready to try again by the late 1870s. Columbia president F.A. Barnard changed his mind, and joined forces with a young "new generation" history professor John Burgess to launch a "School of Political Science" in 1880. In Burgess's scheme, it was to be a French Grande Ecole-style school for the training of civil servants (Burgess's proposal basically translated the curriculum of SciencesPo in Paris). Its curriculum covered economics, history, international law and the like. It was not as firmly segregated as the old scientific schools had been - Columbia college students could enter SPS after completing three years of classics (but they would go on to receive a B.Phil rather than B.A.). Burgess introduced a German-style seminar and Ph.D. for post-graduates. German-trained Richmond Mayo-Smith was the first economist appointed to Columbia, and raised to "professor of political economy" in 1887, when more economists (e.g. Seligman) were brought in. Columbia's SPS was a success and soon would rival Hopkins and arguably surpass it in prominence and production of graduates by the end of the century.

The University of Michigan followed closely. President Angell had reluctantly divested himself of economics in 1880, and passed it over to H.C. Adams (who now split his semesters between Michigan and Cornell), and made a couple other social science and history appointments (T.M. Cooley, C.K. Adams). During Angell's absence on a mission to China in 1880-81, Michigan established a "School of Political Science" on Columbia's model.

The University of Pennsylvania tapped gilded age fortunes to create the Wharton School that same year (1880), not for civil servants per se, but for the training of business and political leaders. Penn's history in economics is actually a little interesting, since it was the most overtly political. Never quite a domineered clerical bastion like the older Ivy Leagues, Penn's trustees included many notable Philadelphia industrialists, and they were adamant about having their views on economic policy (notably American System protectionism) delivered to the students. They ejected Penn president Henry Vethake in 1860, who had been delivering economics as part of the final year course for a while, for not being protectionist enough, and in 1870 introduced a new required social sciences course (and from 1874 a dedicated professor of social sciences, Ralph Ellis Thompson), with readings coming exclusively out of Henry Carey's textbook. Industrialist Joseph Wharton (a Carey disciple) wanted to reinforce that mission. The creation of the Wharton School in 1880 gave the funds for the hiring of a new slate of German-trained "new generation" economists (E.J.James, S.N. Patten) through Wharton who crossed over with the main Penn college and took over Thompson's social sciences load. The rise of a new provost, William Pepper, an enthusiast of the German model, in 1881, reinforced that direction.

1880s & after

Economics at the beginning of the 1870s had been practically non-existent and teaching limited to the president (or his proxy) in a final year. A decade later, by the beginning of the 1880s, economics professors began being appointed and a slate of elective courses on a variety of economics topics began popping up on the menu in many schools. It was still not exclusively economics - it was usually married with modern history and politics under political science or social sciences generally. But by the late 1880s it was already being pushed in the direction of further specialization.

The new generation of German-trained Americans were the principal spirits behind the reform push in the 1880s, towards the German model in American universities. In places like Hopkins, the German seminar model was introduced, and students had to present a research theses to graduate. But the seminar model did not take hold everywhere, or became limited to a graduate school thing (e.g. Columbia). Nonetheless, there were significant changes at the undergraduate level, the old Oxbridge method of tutoring, strict reading and recitation fell away, replaced by more open-ended lectures and written exams, which continues to characterize American colleges today.

The new generation brought not only German-style education, but also German-style economics to American shores - specifically, the German Historical School. With it came a suspicion of economic theory and an attachment to empiricism and historicism. In the 1880s, feisty new generation economists broke into Methodenstreit fights with the old guard in the pages of contemporary American magazines and reviews.

The new generation also carried German policy ideas about the role of the state. They were suspicious of laissez faire, and saw the mission of economics in the service of social reform, which fed into the growing progressive movement, sometimes spilled over into outright socialism. Many of the new professors of economics styled themselves public intellectuals, wrote about social sciences and policy generally, and spoke openly in the local and national press about hot topics which sometimes landed them in hot water with still-clerical administrators and conservative university trustees.

As the Gilded Age advanced, there were still more universities created out of the industrialist fortunes. 

Stanford University (f.1884) tapped into the Central Pacific fortune of railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, as a vanity project of Stanford himself, after he was rejected by the political-dominated Board of Regents of the University of California. He had no idea what he wanted to do with it, but hired a president David Starr Jordan who had very much the Hopkins model in mind, and stocked it with Hopkins graduates. Economics was envisaged from the start as part of political science and sociology. But Stanford had immense growing pains - particularly over the issue of salaries and academic freedom. Dominated by Jane Stanford (the widow of Leland), who insisted on hiring and firing professors at will, Stanford was unable to hold on to faculty for long and became a revolving door with a poor reputation that took many decades to overcome. So Stanford is not really a factor at this stage, other than a temporary staging post in the careers of many economists.

The University of Chicago (f.1892) took Standard Oil money of John D. Rockefeller. Unlike Stanford, Rockefeller gave Chicago president William Rainey Harper virtual carte blanche. And Harper used it to build the first exclusive economics department in the country, unattached to any other division. Harper raided Cornell and other universities for faculty. Its first economics professor, J. Laurence Laughlin became a sort of the "King Arthur" of Chicago economics - a semi-mythical founder of Chicago's combative conservatism, and presided for nearly three decades over a round-table of varied young knights that came and went. Unlike Stanford, Chicago became a factor almost immediately.

The creation of Chicago threatened Wisconsin's bid as the premier Midwestern university (Michigan aside), and prompted Wisconsin to finally get its act together. President Bascom had been run out by the trustees in 1887 for his excessive progressive moral crusading. The new president T.C. Chamberlin had an affectation for German model, but also the original Wisconsin "public service" mission in mind. He began implementing both immediately - introducing extension lectures on practical topics for the Wisconsin public, promoting greater interaction between the College of Agriculture and practicing farmers, while at the same time introducing more Germanic research-orientated graduate programs for the Wisconsin students. But, as mentioned, the creation of Chicago proved a threat, and Chamberlin hurriedly founded the "School of Economics, Political Science and History" in 1892 (arguing the French civil service angle) and succeeded in roping in the dean of the new generation, Richard T. Ely (then unhappy at Hopkins) to head it. Ely arrived with a coterie of junior faculty and advanced students from Hopkins. Wisconsin's rise as a bastion of Institutionalist economics begins here.

Associations

Professionalization and specialization quickly followed, and by the late 1880s had taken wing.

It is unsurprising that the first professional associations - the AEA (f.1886) and the AAPSS (f.1889) - came out of the most German of schools, Johns Hopkins and Penn respectively. But associations had started earlier and had growing pains of their own.  The earliest American association in the social sciences (generally speaking) was the American Statistical Association (f. 1839). It had been founded on the model of the British SSL, where social science researchers (mostly amateurs and social reformers) could meet and present empirical data on social stuff they had collected to each other.  In a similar spirit, the American Social Science Association (ASSA) had been founded in 1865 by a group of charities in Boston, and was modeled on the British NAPSS. This came in response to mass immigration and rapid urbanization of the 1850s which had brought up a series of social problems in many eastern cities. The ASSA was not an academic organization, but a social reform organization. Its intent was to bring together educated people of various backgrounds (activists, academics, clerics, charity workers, businessmen, politicians, etc.) in contact with each other, to present their findings, and coordinate with each other on legislative proposals (on public health, sanitation, education, urban planning, police and penal system, trade unions, etc.). The ASSA was never really effective as a national organization, given that most such reforms were the prerogative of municipal and state legislatures, rather than national. So some local chapters of the ASSA were better organized and more active than others.

The big thing of the ASSA was its annual national conference, where people from all over the country met. In the 1880s, as social scientists were finally setting themselves up in universities as professional academics, it quickly dawned that this was a unique opportunity for holding parallel conferences on more exclusively academic topics they were researching. The Johns Hopkins academics were the first to part ways and use the annual ASSA meeting to set up exclusive sessions for themselves, without the confusing hoi polloi of amateurs. The historians, under Herbert Baxter Adams, defected first, founding the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1884. This was followed up by the economists, under Richard T. Ely, who founded the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1886. These moves had encouraged by Hopkins president Gilman as a way to raise Hopkins's national profile.

But the idea for the AEA was actually older. The Penn economists, besides being all German-trained and faithfully protectionist, were also the first to come up with the idea of putting economics in the service of economic and social reform, along the lines of the German Verein fur Socialpoliitk. While still students in Halle, Germany, James and Patten had drafted the first scheme for an equivalent American association, to fight the influence of "British" economics (with its attachment to laissez faire and free trade), and embrace a more "German" economics (more protectionist, with an interventionist state). But Ely pipped them to the punch, and established the AEA in 1886 with a manifesto articulating the similar Verein-like principles and goals.

The Penn economists (James, Patten) actually protested the creation of the AEA. They disliked the professional character of the AEA and the segregation of economics from the other social sciences. They urged economists should stay under the "Economics" and "Finance" sections of the ASSA meetings as the best avenue to fulfill its social reform function. They saw the AHA & AEA defections as a Hopkins-engineered gambit to take over. As the ASSA was impotent to prevent it, and hobbled as a result, the Penn guys decided to strike out on their own and founded their own association, more in line with the original open ASSA spirit. The Philadelphia branch of the ASSA  was one of the more active branches anyway, so it was not too hard to elevate that branch into a new American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS, f.1889). Despite its national monicker, the activities of the AAPSS were primarily coordinated between Pennsylvania schools (Penn, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, etc.)

Conservative economists did not like the German historicist and socialist spirit of Ely's AEA, and had already founded their own small exclusive private "Political Economy Club" in 1883 (main spirit was J. Laurence Laughlin, then at Harvard, and Hopkins's Simon Newcomb), modeled on the similar London dining-discussion club. The AEA and the PE Club threw muck at each other for a little while, but it was clear the AEA, with its more open membership and more professional character had the upper hand, and the PE Club dissipated. Laughlin refused to join the AEA and chided former members, like Harvard's Taussig, from breaking ranks and doing so.

The main move for the "acceptability" of the AEA was ejection of Ely in 1892 for too much radicalism. After Ely's departure, the AEA took decisive moves to become a more broad-based, more academic, more professional, and less polemical, and neutral on policy.

Ely's "loss of control" of the AEA was not taken kindly his fellow travelers, and provoked a new split in 1895: the creation of the "Political Science Association" (PSA). The name was deceptive. It was an economics association, chock-full of bona fide economists - mainly Institutionalist economists from the Midwest, who had been former colleagues and students of Ely (notably HC Adams at Michigan and John Commons, then at Indiana; Ely himself had moved to Wisconsin in 1892). Disappointed by the neutral turn of the AEA, the PSA explicitly "restored" the original political and social reform goals of the original AEA. Although the PSA diplomatically assured the AEA that it was not a rival organization, but merely a regional one, limited to the Midwest, it was nonetheless perceived as a threat. The PSA charged that the AEA was dominated by eastern economists, that meetings were always east of the Alleghenies, negligent of the needs and struggles of Midwestern states, and the pressure which Midwestern economists were under in their universities (this was the height of agrarian socialism and the Bryan campaign, where Midwestern economists being asked to pick sides). The threat of schism prompted the AEA to hold joint meetings with the PSA in Indianapolis (Commons's base) in 1895 and elected HC Adams as president to mollify the midwesterners. The PSA lingered on as a regional organization, but its schismatic character dissipated when Ely was unexpectedly elected president of the AEA in 1899, healing some of the old rifts.

[Note: the second PSA - the modern APSA - was created in the early 1900s, not for ideological or regional reasons, but rather professional reasons; as further specialization in the late 1890s and early 1900s finally separated economics from sociology from political science, and professors in the latter wanted their own professional association. With the academics all gone into their own associations, the ASSA was hallowed out, and basically wound up by 1909.]

Publications

Early American economists tended to publish sparingly but widely, in general-interest reviews, like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, the New Englander, the Princeton Review, North American Review, etc. The closest thing to an economics journal in the 1870s was the curious International Review, a review of history and social sciences, edited by the president of Lehigh University.

But beginning in the mid-1880s, a slate of new dedicated economics publications were launched to advertise the research of the new departments and associations. Again, this was very similar to the model in German universities. The Hopkins folks blazed the way with launching the The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science in 1882, properly speaking a periodically-published paper series rather than a journal. 1886 was a banner year: it saw the launch of Harvard's Quarterly Journal of Economics and Columbia's Political Science Quarterly and also the Publications of the AEA (half-paper series, half-journal that would drag out to 1911, when firmly journal AER was founded). The Penn guys launched the Annals of the AAPSS in 1891, Chicago responded with the Journal of Political Economy in 1892, while Yale social scientists took over the Yale Review in 1892 and made it effectively their house organ. Further afield, Michigan launched the Publications of the Michigan Political Science Association in 1893.
 

 

HET: list of pages on economics at US universities: Traditional colonial colleges: Harvard University (in Cambridge, Massachusetts, f.1636), College of William & Mary (in Williamsburg, Virginia, f.1693) Yale University (in New Haven, Connecticut, f.1701), Princeton University (in Princeton, New Jersey, f.1746) Columbia University (in New York City, f.1754), University of Pennsylvania (in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, f.1755) Brown University (in Providence, Rhode Island, f.1761) Antebellum universities: University of Virginia (in Charlottesville, Virginia) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (in Troy, New York, f.1824) New York University (in New York City, f.1831) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) (in Cambridge, Massachusetts, f.1861) Cornell University (in Ithaca, New York, f.1865) Postbellum New Generation (German-model research) universities: The Johns Hopkins University (in Baltimore, Maryland, f.1876), Stanford University (in Palo Alto, California, f.1885) University of Chicago (in Chicago, Illinois, f.1892) State universities University of Michigan (in Ann Arbor, Michigan, f.1817) University of Wisconsin (in Madison, Wisconsin, f.1848) University of California (in Berkeley, California, f.1868) Later universities  New School for Social Research (in New York City, f.1918) Other American institutions The American Social Science Association (f.1865) The American Economic Association (f.1885) The American Academy of Political and Social Science (f.1889) The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) (f.1920) The Cowles Commission (f.1932)

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