On the Origins of American Business Leaders: Frank W. Taussig, Carl S. Joslyn, and the “Brain Trust” of American Eugenics

Abstract

In their 1932 volume American Business Leaders: A Study in Social Origins and Social Stratification, Frank W. Taussig and Carl S. Joslyn, then a young Harvard graduate, argued that success in business depended more on innate superiority than on other environmental factors such as financial aid, influential connections, and formal education. The aim of this article is to analyze the main contentions of Taussig and Joslyn, as well as the intellectual genesis of, and the general reactions to, this controversial volume. Although our main focus is on Taussig and Joslyn, other figures, all directly affiliated with Harvard, will play a decisive role in our narrative—the economist Thomas Nixon Carver, the psychologist William McDougall, and the sociologist Pitirim Aleksandrovič Sorokin. This makes the scope of this article in many respects broader than its title may suggest—in the sense that it will allow us to place a work like American Business Leaders within the context of an important strand of social science research at Harvard during the interwar years

Keywords:

• Frank Williams Taussig
• eugenics
• hereditarianism
• business leaders
• Harvard

JEL Classification Codes:

• B1
• B15

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Speaking of Taussig’s Principles, James Tobin (1985, 29) wrote: “[t]his popular text, still used in Harvard’s introductory course when I took it as a sophomore in 1936–37, was like Marshall’s Principles a wise man’s serious attempt to expound the whole field as he saw it. Alas, the days of books like that are past.”

2 Reference is made here to the chapter on Taussig included in Schumpeter’s volume Ten Great Economists (1952). This chapter was originally published as an obituary in the Quarterly Journal of Economics under the joint authorship of Joseph Schumpeter, Arthur H. Cole, and Edward S. Mason (1941).

3 For Carver’s own account of his arrival at Harvard, see his autobiography (Carver 1949).

4 Carver was among the nine Harvard faculty members appointed to the Advisory Board of the American Eugenics Society, a position he held from 1926 to 1935.

5 For an exhaustive and well documented discussion of the eugenic impact of minimum wage legislation, see Leonard 2016.

6 As to how to deal with those “human dregs” which would be so expelled from the labor market, Carver (1915, 140) was more extreme than Taussig: “[e]nforced colonization, the multiplication of almshouses, or a liberal administration of chloroform would be necessary to dispose of a considerable number of our population.” See Fiorito and Orsi 2017 for a full account of Carver’s eugenic views.

7 This led him to assert, in another significant passage, that “the most prosperous strata among the population are those in which intellectual gifts are most likely to appear. They are prosperous in the main because they have such gifts.” (Taussig 1911, 2: 249: emphasis in original)

8 “If it be granted that psychological knowledge is helpful to economists,” wrote Wesley C. Mitchell (1910, 197) in the Journal of Political Economy, “then Mr. McDougall’s criticism of the traditional economic psychology must be faced.” Against the rationality assumptions of classical and neoclassical economists, Mitchell continued, McDougall (1908, 11, quoted in Mitchell 1910, 197) has showed us that “mankind is only a little bit reasonable and to a great extent very unintelligently moved in quite unreasonable ways.”

9 McDougall’s name appears among the members of the advisory council of the AES from 1923 to 1930.

10 “[W]e may conclude,” Burt put it (1909, 176), “that the superior proficiency at Intelligence tests on the part of the boys of superior parentage, was inborn. And thus we seem to have proved marked inheritability in the case of a mental character of the highest ‘civic worth.’” In a slightly more cautions fashion, English (1917, 328) affirmed: “[a]lthough he [the writer] is not prepared to say and does not in fact believe, that environment has had nothing to do with the superiority of one group over the other, he is convinced that the hereditary factor plays an altogether preponderating part.”

11 For a full account of Sorokin’s life and career, see Johnston 1995.

12 As Sorokin (1927, 502) wrote in his unequivocal style: “[n]o education can make out of an idiot a bright man; out of a man of average heredity a genius.”

13 From his hereditarianism, Sorokin did not hesitate to draw explicitly eugenic conclusions. For instance, writing with the assistance of Carle C. Zimmerman (Sorokin and Zimmerman 1928, 36) on the composition of farmer leaders in the United States, he noted with great concern that “female leaders appear to ‘buy’ their leadership at the cost of marriage,” and that the “role of leader means sterility for them.” As a consequence, he warned, “leadership by women contributes a full share to the extinction of that which seems to be a valuable stock and to the so-called impoverishment of the best hereditary fund of the race.”

14 For their research project Taussig and Joslyn had received financial support from the William F. Milton Fund at Harvard University.

15 In regard to influential connection and financial aid, the two environmental factors more difficult to assess, the questionnaire contained the following questions: (1) Were any of your relatives or friends interested, as owners or executives, (a) in the business which you first entered, (b) in your present organization when you entered it; and (2) Did you, during the early stages of your business career, receive substantial aid (not less than $10,000) through the provision of capital from either of the following sources (a) inheritance, (b) relatives or friends?

16 To support their view, Taussig and Joslyn (242n6) referred in a footnote to the “comprehensive survey of the more important studies of men of genius” in Sorokin’s Social Mobility.

17 Taussig and Joslyn regarded business as an “open vocation,” with no insurmountable barriers to entry. In their opinion: “[w]hatever may have been the conditions determining the ultimate degree of success which he could achieve … the son of the wage-earner found himself at no substantial disadvantage, as compared with the business man’s son, in entering business and bidding for the favorable consideration of his superiors. Conditions of entry into this particular calling may be said to have been much the same for men of diverse social origins” (1932, 245).

18 According to Taussig and Joslyn (1932, 255) “[t]his fact makes it appear improbable that there is any considerable suppression of talent among the laborers’ sons engaged in business, since it is on the lower grades of ability that we should expect the repressive influence of the environment to tell most heavily.” This in turn was based on their belief that individuals of the highest order of native ability, as they assumed to be those associated with companies of higher grades, “do not find the absence of favoring conditions a serious hindrance to progress” (266).

19 On the other hand, data revealed no relation between formal business training and degree of success in business, except that such training does seem to have some influence on the time taken to reach a given position.

20 Joslyn, it should be noted, had reached the same conclusions in his dissertation (1930, 427–438) from which we cannot forbear to quote at length: “It seems to us that the data yielded by this inquiry, when taken as a whole, are more easily and reasonably explained under the “nature” hypothesis than under the “nurture” hypothesis. Almost none of the expectations which have been advanced under the latter hypothesis have found confirmation in our data. In the absence of such confirmation, it does not seem unreasonable to turn to the alternative hypothesis as affording a more likely explanation of the observed restriction on freedom of movement out of the lower and middle occupational classes into the class of successful business men. That is to say, it appears probable that the level of innate ability representative of the lower and middle classes in society is inferior to that representative of the higher classes. It is for this reason, more than for any other, that the productivity of the lower occupational classes in business leaders is so markedly inferior to that of the higher classes.”

21 Taussig and Joslyn’s volume also caught the attention of the national press. The New York Times, for instance, announced its publication in a full column headline “Social Origins Studied” (1932), with the telling subtitle, “Lack of native ability rather than lack of opportunity blamed for failure to rise.” A more extensive review of the book appeared the following year (“Business Leaders” 1933).

22 On Spengler’s eugenic views, see Hoff (2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luca Fiorito

Luca Fiorito is at the University of Palermo, Italy; Massimiliano Vatiero is at the University of Trento, Italy, and Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland. This article represents a substantial extension of a chapter of a broader project of Luca Fiorito on Thomas N. Carver and the Harvard tradition in eugenics.

Massimiliano Vatiero

Luca Fiorito is at the University of Palermo, Italy; Massimiliano Vatiero is at the University of Trento, Italy, and Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland. This article represents a substantial extension of a chapter of a broader project of Luca Fiorito on Thomas N. Carver and the Harvard tradition in eugenics.